Renaissance

2012 was one of my most productive years, an explosion of joy and constant work. I published my poetry book, 365 Universes with over 100 colour illustrations, and wrote my first novel, The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. I painted Triumph of the Mechanauts, An Octopus Finally Killing A Lighthouse, The Paranoid Schizophrenia of Richard Dadd, and made a complex wooden cabinet for it, and countless other detailed oil paintings, as well as composing The Love Symphony.

My visual art began to include complex, sculptural surrounds. Initially designed as decorated frames, these began to become part of the artwork itself in works such as The Bully and The Transience Of Love.

I continued to push at limits over the subsequent years, aiming to improve with each artwork (as I try to do today), entering my first London Art Fair, making the Eden Iris which was certainly an engineering step-up from the Dadd Cabinet, and holding my first London solo exhibition at the start of 2015.

I regularly attended the Nantwich based Art Up Close club, and in 2014 after losing access to our premises I started an art club of my own in a church hall, and held weekly meetings there. This kept me in touch with the small number of local visual artists, but it was always difficult to maintain enough numbers to keep the club alive. In 2015 I started to professionally collaborate with Macclesfield artist Sabine Kussmaul, a fellow recipient of the Cheshire Open Art Prize in 2012. Over time Sabine and I began to experiment with live performances involving projected video and music, an extension of Sabine's contemporaneous practice of small installations.

In autumn 2015, I was offered the role of producer and presenter of an arts radio programme at community radio station RedShift Radio. The broadcast of these programmes originally overlapped with art club days, but at the end of the year, I decided to close the art club and make the radio station the focus of my weekly excursions.