My Adopted England
During those first months in London I was painting as well as larking around and singing, and in 1953 I started at art school, but found to my disappointment that they didn’t really teach me anything substantial. After two years I drifted away, but then was lucky enough to bump into Hayward Veal, an Australian artist that I had always admired hugely. He was great and invited me to a two-week course at Heatherly’s Art School in London although I confessed I had no money to pay for this.
Hayward (Bill) Veal Portrait
I set out to impress Hayward Veal him but it all went wrong. My paint was too thick, everything was going brown and horrible. When he saw what was happening he told me to start again with a proper canvas, one brush, one colour, a rag and some turps. He got me to set up a table of interesting objects and paint the whole thing as a blur, then work on light and dark elements with the rag or the brush, and use as little paint as possible. He told me not to paint what I knew to be there, but only to paint what I saw. I learnt more from him in two weeks than the art school had taught me in two years. He took me under his wing and became my mentor, and I started painting portraits for a fiver a time of anyone who would pay me.
Over the next six years I gained in confidence and worked on various shows for BBC children’s television My painting took a back seat for a while, although I did a lot of drawings and one or two paintings in those shows. I married my lovely Alwen in 1958, and spent a year on a TV show in Perth. We then travelled back to England and my career in music and TV continued on apace while my serious painting career remained firmly on the back burner.
