After completing my second year at St. Martins in London, I decided to settle in Johannesburg, a city I had passed through briefly on two occasions. 

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After 10 years of study all incoming funds were terminated and savings depleted. I needed to get a job immediately to support myself and my daughter. Within two weeks I found a job in an advertising agency, at

the lowest entry point, despite my lengthy years of study and many qualifications. Here I manually arranged price tags and products like washing powder and sausages on a page, mostly newspaper advertisements for a big retail outfit called OK Bazaars. I often wept. After a decade in the hallowed halls of academia this was brutal, only serving to strengthen my resolve to be a painter. I moved rapidly up the work ranks, changing jobs frequently, saving every penny I could to see myself through one year of painting.

 

During the two and a half years in advertising I had two exhibitions of my student work in Durban and Johannesburg, and collected some of the material for the Famous South African Series. After that I decided to isolate myself from the vaudeville atmosphere that fuelled Johannesburg’s bohemian sector, which I had become embroiled in during the last tense years of Apartheid. I used some my savings to relocate to and work at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, 1985, kick starting my career by painting Marianne Fassler, while my daughter Danielle attended a school focused on teaching foreign children French.

 

During the years in advertising and later in the time between commissions and working on the FAMOUS SOUTH AFRICAN SERIES, the ICON SERIES, in the last decade LATEST WORK and writing a book about my life as a painter, I regularly did self-portraits, portraits of friends, comments on and records of my life, as the whim grabbed me. Another interest was doing adaptations of copies of well-known paintings from history, and now and then, the odd flower study. These miscellaneous works are categorised as assorted and are predominantly in my private collection.