I grew up in the Lake District, surrounded by open countryside, mountains, rivers and the kind of landscape that made adventure feel close at hand. There was a river at the bottom of our garden, and from an early age I had a strong sense that there was always something beyond the familiar waiting to be discovered.
At sixteen, I joined the British Army. What began as a young man’s search for adventure quickly became something much bigger. I experienced everything from the relative ease of military life in Germany to the responsibility and intensity of serving as a frontline unit commander.
When I left the military, the travelling continued. I spent ten years in South Africa, around eighteen months in Australia, a year in America, and time in Zambia, Thailand and many other places along the way.
In Zambia I worked on an emerald mine, where we found some remarkable stones. That experience became part of a much longer connection with precious materials and craftsmanship, and I went on to spend around thirty years in the jewellery industry.
Through all of those different lives and places, one subject has always interested me more than any other: people.
I have spent a lifetime observing human behaviour and meeting people from every kind of background. I have always wanted to understand what drives Man — what makes someone choose one path rather than another, what makes people create, endure, destroy, love, change direction or begin again.
I see Man as more than the body moving through life. I see Man as a spirit — the source of decision, imagination and the creative colour that is added to life.
That way of looking at the world runs through everything I create.
My books contain elements of my own experience, but they also explore other possibilities — who I might have become, who someone else might become, and what can happen when a person is placed in circumstances that force choices to be made.
For me, life is about the journey. The places we go, the people we meet, the things that happen to us and the decisions we make all leave something behind.
My art comes from the same place. I can take what I have seen, experienced or imagined and then give myself the freedom to change it. The physical world has rules. Imagination does not have to obey them.
That freedom is one of the things I value most about creating.
I am not particularly interested in reproducing what already exists. I am more interested in exploring what could exist.
Art, writing and poetry are simply different ways for me to observe life, question it, remember it and sometimes reinvent it.
Create, then keep creating.