It surprised me! I remember thinking Ryepress must be close on 10 years old but it wasn’t until I looked it up that I realised I had first registered the name on the 15th March 2000: The ides of March

With the 10th Aniversary looming I decided some areas of the site needed an overhaul; in particular the CV and Exhibitions pages were looking a little tired. With Ryepress now a gallery in its own right I really don’t go in for as many external exhibitions any more and so both pages, as well as having a lot of the same information have just stagnated.

I have decided (perhaps egotistically) to create this page as a more anecdotal, informal autobiography as, ultimately a replacement for the rather formal CV and the rather boring Exhibitions. Both are still accessible from this page but will eventually be removed.

I apologise for the scrappy and somewhat unprofessional appearance of this page. It is very much a on going project; Mistakes will be made - please bear with me! Ryepress is evolving into a strange creature! Imagine the average artist’s website as a small compact B&B - well Ryepress is slowly turning into a mixture of Gormenghast and Hogwarts! There will be things you don’t expect; dark corners and unexpected cul-de-sacs (possible even bad spelling!)

Early Years
I was born in Thorpe Bay, Southend, Essex in 1957. My parents were from Manchester. My mother was what was then called a commercial artist and my father was a trainee accountant at the Ilford film company at the nearby town of the same name. My father started doing evening classes to further his career and ended up teaching them - much in the same way I would be teaching Etching and Photography at the Working Men's College in the 1980s.

After a short time in Gloucester and for me the first taste of public school at Kings School Gloucester, the family upped sticks and moved to Singapore in 1964 and my father became a lecturer at the Singapore polytechnic. In 1966 we returned to England, sailing through the Suez canal shortly before it closed. My mother was pregnant with my younger sister and so I was packed off with the family instamatic on a coach trip up the Red sea, and along the Nile to the pyramids followed by  cheese rolls at the Cairo Hilton (funny what impresses an nine year old!).

After spending a year and a half in Epsom and several more schools my father again decided to drag us across the world to take on a new job at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa. Another long haul sea journey and we arrived in South Africa.

Revulsion at the apartheid system soon caused the family to move to the independent Kingdom of Lesotho and I was packed off to a South African boarding school: Kearney College, modelled on the public school system of 1930s Britain.

Spending 3 years as an English boy in a South African school was not a great deal of fun. In a country that was almost universally reviled and isolated for its political system I soon made myself unpopular for arguing the toss over every banned sports tour and every turn of the sanctions screw.  Eventually, after endlessly threatening to get myself expelled I found myself at the age of sixteen studying O' levels at  home on the campus of the University of Botswana Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS) at Roma - 22 miles from Maseru in the foothills of the Drakensburg mountains.

Shortly before the Lesotho government nationalised the Roma campus my father made well timed decision and we moved to Swaziland. After countless schools, several different education systems and a year of teenage rebellion supposedly studying O' levels by correspondence course I found myself doing A' levels at the refreshingly liberal and totally enjoyable Waterford / Kamhlaba boarding school in Swaziland.

In 1976 During my final term at Waterford my parents moved to Chingola on the Zambian copper belt where my father had become an economic advisor to the government (not that the Zambian economy improved much!).

I finished exams shortly before Christmas and decided to visit friends in Durban. On the way  I had my passport, money and ticket back to Zambia stolen and spent two weeks hitching between South Africa, Swaziland, and Botswana, bluffing my way through border controls, sleeping under bushes and getting on the nerves  of various embassy staff. During this time I drove halfway across the Tranvaal (despite never having learnt to drive),  spent a night travelling up the length of Botwana to Francistown with a train full of extremely exuberant and inebriated mine workers and several hours in Francistown police station as a suspected Rhodesian Spy! I finally turned up in Chingola late on Christmas eve with only a PO Box number for where my parents lived and most of my belonging still in Lusaka airport!

In 1977 after a brief spell in Zambia I flew back to England with the intention of going to art school. My art career almost ended before it began as the almost empty Alitalia flight was ordered to land on the shell cratered runway at Luanda, Angola by MPLA forces. Marched at gunpoint from the plane I naively asked the soldiers if I could have one of the MPLA posters that were plastered over the pockmarked walls of  the airport buildings. I didn’t get a poster.

I reached London and started my first job - as a bought ledger clerk at the Amalgamated Dental Company in Broadwick street. In September 1977 I started my foundation year at the Byam Shaw School of Art in Notting Hill Gate.

(next bit coming soon!)

Rye   Hastings   Beachscapes    Greenhouses   St Pancras   Nudes   Other   
Rye   Hastings  RX   Coastal Textures   Groynes   Life Drawings   Other
Figure Painting  Fallen Angel Nudes

NOW WE ARE 10!