The final item in this History of my Archive in 10 Objects found in my father’s loft are two sketchbooks from my earliest days in Japan in 1987. Just after I arrived in Tokyo in January 1987 I bought a number sketchbooks of various sizes and spent a lot of the first year in particular being the sketching tourist, drawing, painting and photographing downtown Tokyo, the people around me, the whole experience of being in Japan. I didn’t think any sketchbooks from early days in J

The penultimate item in this series of 10 objects from my dad’s loft is a bag of unpublished portfolio material from circa 1984. There was a lot of material from London in my dad’s loft, when I left my studio just before I flew off to Japan it was the natural place to just shove everything, my entire output from 1983-1986, and it’s pretty well all been preserved, waiting for me to reclaim thirty years later. I moved to London in 1983, encouraged by two children’s book commiss

Number 8 in this series of ten archive items from my dad’s loft are some surviving copies of The Blue Blanket fanzine, which briefly flared on the streets of Norwich from 1981 to 1982. Three years in Manchester may have seen a mixed development with my artwork, but it had a profound effect on other aspects of my life – especially through music. It was a fabulous time to be in Manchester – I moved there at the height of punk, and left just before the Haçienda opened. I saw all

For the seventh selection in A History of my Archive in 10 Objects here are some surviving sketchbooks from my 3 years on the Illustration course at Manchester Polytechnic. Okey, so this is cheating a bit – these are clearly more than one object! But the contents are pretty consistent and were all bundled together in my father’s loft, so I think I can safely lump them together as a single item. Actually, very little remains of my work from the years 1978-1981 while I was at M

Number 5 in the History of my Archive in 10 Objects, is this triple set of bird studies from early 1977. I was 17,  I was about to leave school and start a foundation course at the now-gone and much lamented Bournville School of Art, I was full steam ahead for a career in illustration, the world of graphic art, experimentation and adventure awaited. But all that was in the future – in the meantime I was generating some income from selling these kinds of traditional studies in

Number 4 in this series of 10 Images from my Archives found at my dad’s house is my old typewriter… and I mean old typewriter! When I was 16 I discovered the work of the Golden Age illustrators (Rackham, Dulac, Heath-Robinson, Stratton etc). In fact it was a re-discovery really as my mum had kept a couple of compendiums from her childhood that had been illustrated by these artists, but I rarely saw those. It was only in the mid-70’s that I began seriously examining children’s

In part three of 10 objects from the archive of objects found in my dad’s house, I’d like to offer this. After the tentative steps of the Henry Hudson picture I worked on two other school projects before setting to work on this large piece, which proved to be the most experimental and successful of my school drawings in pure pen and ink. It was drawn from a randomly selected photo reference using a multi coloured pen and ink line technique – on the face and hat I used three s

Number 2 in the discoveries made at my dad’s house from long hidden archives of my work. In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d ever see this picture again, but there it was, in my dad’s loft, warts and all, the very first drawing I ever attempted in pen and ink, from 1975, aged 16. Prior to this drawing I’d worked steadily but unassumedly at school on assigned projects. It was acknowledged that I was “good at art”, but this was post modernist, late hippy mid 1970’s, most o

For the first in the Museum of My Archive in 10 Objects  (apologies to Neil MacGregor and the British Museum) I bring you a sketch of our house, drawn just before my 17th birthday from our back garden during the sweltering summer of 1976. We lived in Butlers Lane, Sutton Coldfield from 1970 until the end of 1977,  this was the house where I grew from child to teenager. It was a corner house and significantly bigger than any of our previous (and subsequent!) homes. My parents

My dad was the last of his generation in our immediate family. One of the consequences of his passing has been the sorting out of all the nooks and crannies of his house, which revealed a lot of things I’d completely forgotten still existed. Not only parental items we grew up with from childhood, but also things left behind by us kids as we moved on in life. As the artist of the family I’ve by far been the worst offender – when I set off to art college all my school art work