Your questions about my Paintings
How do you know what you are going to paint?
It depends. If I have a subject, like a portrait then the decisions are more about style and medium. When there is no set task I am often spurred into action by an image that is already in my head. I seem to have an unlimited supply of these, I can relax, close my eyes and 'see' literally thousands of faces or scenes. I occurs to me that everyone must have this 'stock' but aren't in the habit of conjuring it up - it's probably the same mechanism that we use to recognise people in crowds. So those images are often a source, but there is another way I approach paintings which is important: The other approach lets the starting point be a response to the actual materials (the surface, the paint, the implements, the environs), once I feel right I simply apply paint, then impose the image I want.

Do you have a set style and painting method?
Style can be separate from method. In general I vary my methods, being sometimes formal, at others breaking all the 'painting' rules. Over a short period I will appear to be changing my type of painting all the time, but if looked at over decades a 'style' or two become quite evident. I am looking forward to getting my back-catalogue of work photographed and put online together, so I can see it like that myself. But there's a lot of work involved before that happens.

When you are being 'informal' what's the process?
Hah! Well I paint, draw, splatter. I scrape and manipulate, using any medium at hand. The result is occasionally marvellous but invariably temporary. It's hard to work that way and avoid changing and losing things. But that's OK. Thousands of experiments lead to an innate understanding of materials, that helps me make better interventions than I used to.

What about Galleries & Competitions?
I've had several exhibitions over the years, and won quite a few Art competitions when I was a kid. But I haven't been very interested in the Art ladder, preferring to make money in other ways and keep my work directed by my own creative inspirations. However, since my studio fire in 2002, I am rethinking this. I've had two shows since and am now thinking I will probably exhibit more often, time permitting.

What's the most you've sold for?
For a single work, the best I did was a few thousand. That's not enough to make it unless one is a formula painter, churning repetitive work out that's popular. Nothing wrong with that either, but it's not my approach. Some paintings take 4-6 months, others just a day.

Of your unconventional paintings, which is the strangest?
Oddly enough, most of my work ends up being representational (though you may have to skew your view a little). A strange result came from a request to paint a portrait of a man who was tragically killed, using a few bad snapshots. I wasn't able to do it. But I did a work which involved dumping the ashes (including nails, hinges, bolts etc.) from my studio woodstove onto some tough Arches paper and mixing in a tub of PVA. For weeks afterwards I painted (with oil) on the scraped away surface and ended up with a pastoral painting, with a quite beautiful and realistic calf. I realised later that the calf represented the deceased man.

What about archival quality?
Most of my work is actually very resilient, each probably has 50-70 or more years in it, but is it archival? Most of my work is archival, some isn't - if it concerns you I can give mey best estimate.

Shouldn't you concentrate on one, or just a few, styles?
I think I already answered this, but I'll add: I read an obituary of someone of whom it was said that 'no medium could contain him' - it's an epitaph that I would happily aspire to, but what seems to happen is that the skills you have worked and reworked end up coming through, so even when it's very different it's got my imprint.