Biography

This is me!

Born in the UK, I emigrated to Canada at the age of four. Apparently I was sick for most of the five day voyage on the Franconia. Growing up I developed a great love for nature the great outdoors, geology, photography and art. My high school was the turning point for me as Ottawa Tech opened up a wonderful world with courses in electronics, auto mechanics, drafting, computers, and graphic arts. I majored in commercial art and though I loved to draw I did not find much pleasure in working on posters. So out of high-school I started work at Atkinson Film Arts which was one of Canadas first animation studios. I started at the bottom cleaning cells and doing photocopies. Time went by and I quickly became production assistant. But all good things come to an end and the studio had a slump so I changed jobs and started editing television shows for the Canadian Armed Forces. Not a very interesting job as it consisted of taping on air shows and then cutting out the adds. It paid well but it was not something that I wanted to spend my life doing. I worked as a server in a 4 star hotel which at that time was one of the best paying jobs, as the tips were great. Back in animation I met someone who would really change my life. And I followed her to the UK where I worked in several Soho studios, working my way up to studio manager. All this was not very artistic, but that would soon change with the birth of my first son. We moved to the southwest of England and I started working as an assistant animator, and then animator for different studios. The animation industry was changing and a great deal of the labour intensive work was now being farmed out to studios in the far east. So Layout was what was being needed and that is what I was doing. One winter it rained for 6 months, light drizzle, to heavy downpour. We cracked and so we bought a house in the south of France. Time to change once again...I put on my construction hat and went to work renovating a bit old farmhouse that had not been lived in for 25 years. From roof to basement, plumbing electricity, staircases, plasterboard and plaster everything that was needed to bring the house back to life. But after nine years we had had enough of each other and so on good terms we parted ways. Since then I have been in the animation industry in Paris and have seen it transform, from a small studio basement production to hundreds of artists working in multiple programs on super computers. Since 2020 I have found myself to be disenchanted with the world of animation and found myself in the need to do something that will last. Oil painting is that, my love of photography has brought the two things together, a lot of what I do is from photographs. But that could change