Our Story

I grew up in Oxford, a town with green arteries running through its centre as the river clay was unsuitable for buildings, just a short way from our house, across a busy road I could be on school playing fields that lead down to a canal and then to Port Meadow with Whytham woods in the distance. I would walk and draw trees and plants, reflections in the water and clouds in the sky.

I enjoyed peering into nooks and crannies, hollow tree trunks, small streams along the banks of the broad river Thames. Later on as the proud owner of a bicycle I would explore the quiet byways and farmland further out of town. Always with a sketchbook, pen and ink or watercolours, recording what I saw was a way of understanding and feeling closer to the natural environment and while my techniques have changed over the years, the aspiration remains the same.

I left School in 1972 to do a year’s foundation course at Wimbledon School of Art, in retrospect the teaching was patchy at best and out of an intake of seventy-five only twenty-five survived the full year, an attrition rate that speaks volumes. Having not had a “gap year” I then took one before attending The West Sussex College of Design in Worthing to study graphics. The teaching was much better but graphics was not for me and it was by the skin of my teeth and some useful contacts of my Mother’s that I secured a place at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford in 1975.

This really is when it all began; Ruskin students each have a personal tutor like all the other students throughout the University. Mine was Chris Dorsett and he gave us all the gift of language which is so important if one is going to hang onto, articulate and discuss the often rather abstract and tenuous concepts that underpin all creative practice. We were also taught life drawing, perspective, composition and colour theory; in fact it was drummed into us so deeply that it now still resides in my subconscious informing every move I make.

I am very grateful for those three years of excellent training. Of course, at the time we all resented it as it seemed so traditional and almost backward looking, some tutors considered the French Impressionists to be rather Avant-garde! My graphics training didn’t go to waste either, one of my friends was social secretary at the Oxford Poly and I designed the posters for all the bands that played there getting beer money and a free ticket to the gig.

Married and expecting Flick and I moved to Ullapool in NW Scotland in 77, initially to clean holiday houses on a big sporting estate in return for a rent-free house. On sunny days in the summer, (Scotland remember!), I would busk on the front in Ullapool selling watercolours; some days I would earn £100 which seemed a small fortune at the time.

After two years we took the plunge and bought a small old croft house in Rhue just to the north of Ullapool, it had a double garage just perfect for conversion to a studio.

My two years of busking had taught me that I liked interacting with customers and I realised that part of my job description was to be an ambassador for art. We also got some animals, planted the garden and lived the self-sufficient dream; it was hard work and time-consuming but it was very rewarding to sit down to a meal and a glass of beer or wine that we had produced ourselves.

In 1984 following on from an exhibition at the Crawford Art Centre in St. Andrews. I was invited to design the stage set for a production of The Brahan Seer written by Norman Malcolm MacDonald that was to tour the Highlands and Islands. This allowed me to work on a large scale and through interacting with the lighting rig it was the first time I understood additive and subtractive colour mixing.

The tour was a success and later in the year moved to a full-scale production at the Eden court theatre Inverness, at the time the largest stage in the UK north of Nottingham with a state-of-the-art lighting rig.

For the tour there had been a brightly coloured floor cloth which the actors loved because it gave them a map as to where they should be standing. We took this idea to the theatre and it meant that the lighting engineer could make separate parts of the floor and set glow. Excited by the potential of additive/subtractive colour the theatre kindly lent me a small lighting rig for a winter and we made a short video “Biston Betularia”. Interestingly this was a taste of things to come with a project for the Highland Festival with John McGeoch and Rob Hall in 2001, VJing at Belladrum and other music Festivals, and Digital Video shorts in support of painting commissions; but I’m getting ahead of myself!

I visited galleries in Edinburgh and Glasgow and started having exhibitions. I got invited by one of the more exciting galleries in Edinburgh at the time, now sadly closed, to visit Iona with six other artists and be part of a fundraiser for the Iona Community.

The resulting work was exhibited in Edinburgh and some weeks later I got a letter from a Gallery in Berlin, would I like to exhibit there? Well of course I said yes and overnight found myself an “international Artist”. Our visit was stimulating as it happened just six months after the wall came down, the city was edgy and exciting, full of fabulous art, I saw Gerhard Richter and Anselm Keifer’s paintings for the first time.

Not long afterwards and also via my association with the 369 Gallery in Edinburgh I won the Warwick Arts Trust painter of the year award. Flick and I flew down to London and I was presented with my award by Iris Murdoch, the London Art scene were all there for a grand dinner, I felt like a rock star!

So by then I was exhibiting in London regularly and with our three children now in school Flick took over running the business leaving me free of admin. With more time to paint, the goats and pigs had gone and so had the chickens, but to this day we still cherish our garden and poly tunnel believing that it is “good for the soul” as well as for the dinner table.

Around this time the Highlands and Islands were given special status in Europe, there was funding to promote the Arts out with the area but no one knew how. Flick was invited to work as a freelance with Highland Region and help curate and organise group exhibitions and take Highland Artists to Art Fairs.

At the Glasgow Art Fair we met Julian Spalding who was setting up the new Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, (GOMA), he bought three of my large paintings and when the Gallery was opened by the Queen six months later my painting was used on the invitation. I shook the gloved hand forgetting to say Mam to rhyme with spam and encouraged her to touch the textured surface of my painting; she was great, just chatty and open.

I graduated to a West end gallery in London. The paintings were all sold from the catalogue before the opening, I’d be in HMV looking at CDs and the gallery would call on my mobile saying they’d sold another, I’d add a few more CDs to my bag.

It couldn’t last of course, the Gallery overstretched themselves and went bust, I tried another but they were pushy and greedy, it didn’t feel right. Our own Gallery and contacts at Rhue had been underpinning it all throughout and we realised that we had the most important thing, a mailing list of clients who had either bought before or expressed an interest.

Flick took over promoting and running the exhibitions, first for me and then when the Highland Region money from Europe dried up winning support from our local enterprise company HIE to develop her own business.

We knocked down the old tin framing shed and built a new workshop with a beautiful exhibition space upstairs. Flick opened her own new gallery beside mine in Rhue with eighteen artists on her books.

She attended art fairs and was invited to exhibit at a Biennale in France, we got to stay in the Chateau with a four-poster bed that was so big that I had to phone her in the night to see which end she was!

In 2016 I came back from holiday to an e-mail from a client who runs a charity in Nepal, would Flick and I like to go trekking for a month, make paintings and raise some money for the charity? In 2017 this turned into the trip of a lifetime, click here for the full story.

During 2018 I worked like crazy but with a calm that I had learned from being amongst Buddhists for four weeks, it was a wonderful time and further endorsed my thoughts about channelling the subconscious.

Strangely when the London exhibition was done and we got home and slowed down I put Nepal in a “box” in my head, for some weeks I felt disorientated and miserable. It took a morning walk, some weeks later along the beach at Rhue for me to hear my mistake, “just open the box James and bring what you’ve learnt in Nepal back home to Scotland”.

So here I am painting mountains that represent permanence and perfect mirror reflections that represent the spiritual realm. It chimes with my environmental concerns, my love of wild places and my early childhood memories of losing myself in a different awareness when immersed in Nature.

This is a very special time in a life that has been a huge privilege to live; I feel humbled and enormously grateful that this has been our path.