"I started painting when I was 6 - and I have been doing it ever since! My first memories are of Sabden and Pendle HilI, but by the time I was 5 we had moved to Accrington, North-East Lancashire where I grew up and was educated. In the austere years of the 50's and early 60's I was surrounded by a landscape of slate-roofed stone terraces and cotton mills in near-terminal decline. But at their edges, the Victorian mill towns gave way to upland meadows and the heather-clad, windswept moors where I used to play as a child - from my earliest days developing a deep love of Nature.

As the years passed, I absorbed the Pennine working-class culture through experience and through the memories of the older generations around me.