Born in London in 1941, I trained as an actor in the early sixties and worked for 30 years as an actor, theatre director and television producer. Since 1996 I have been Director/Senior Tutor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. I have drawn and sketched for over 30 years without any formal training but only started painting in oils in 2000.

There is no particular philosophy to my work but I love line and colour and space and am fascinated by the human face. I also have a passion for Shakespeare, which is where it all begins...

My paintings, like so many things in life, usually start as doodles, scribbled in and around rehearsals or performances of his plays I have directed over time. I rarely start with a finished idea, the characters just grow out of the scribbles and assume an identity.

I am not proud and will borrow from whatever is around me, rather like an actor does. And, just as the actor assumes an identity as he enters the space, I take up my characters as though they were simply waiting in the wings.

I love playing with colour and having no formal technique in place allows me a terrific freedom to play. The paintings are unashamedly theatrical - understandably given my 40 years of directing. I am not attempting to record any particular performance, just ideas that come out of the circumstances of the plays and the rehearsal process or even, sometimes, a tube journey. Life and the theatre are so inextricably intertwined.

Plays are about people wandering into space and wondering how to make the best of things, as in life. What is interesting for me is not the outcome but the journey and the marks the journey leaves behind.

Equally I am absorbed by the landscape of the face. In a similar way faces also reflect journeys. As rooms have ghosts, so too do faces. There is always somewhere in a human face the residue of a bewildering chaos that reflects sadness, lost dreams or, occasionally, joy!