Curriculum Vitae II
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae III
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae IV
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Curriculum Vitae V
oil and acrylic on board 
150 x 120 cm 
1986 - 1992

Most children like sets of things. The stamp and cigarette-card collecting, however, usually become, with the chemistry sets and rainbow rows of coloured pencils, transmuted in adulthood into filing systems and golf clubs. It is one of the charms of life rather than one of its humiliations to spot the childhood ancestry of some present folie de grandeur. Is knowing the head waiter of a fashionable restaurant who calls you by your name, directs you to a favourite table and gives you an aperitif on the house, substantially different from having got on the right side of the lady in the sweet shop who with a wink will give you extra measure? As is was, so it is, and my particular love of amassing sets of things has turned into the making of them. Time and again I have painted a picture only to find the call for another to provide a pair, and to yield then to the irresistible urge to add another and another to 'build up a set' (the magic of the phrase still excites), of works of identical size on the same theme, hoping of course that some big boy in the great playground of the art world has in turn retained his passion for set collecting and will swap me lots of money for it.

Thus a set of pictures certainly seemed apt as a format for dealing with childhood. If their scale is larger than that of the matchbox top or those other first collected things, might this be a way of saying that childhood's little epiphanies were in fact great revelations?

Why Curriculum Vitae? Are those not the world's dullest documents, a yawn to produce or peruse?

In the days when I used to apply for jobs (before I managed to get away with making art all the time) I was always writing out CV's. After I left school (having dodged National Service)(Phew!), I went on the dole, which involved being regularly sent for interviews. My main aim at that stage of course was not to get the job (though I did enjoy going round factories and being told 'There's a bright future for you, my lad, in the world of ball-bearings') so I made my CV appropriately sparse. Later on, with a family to support, I learned to muster impressive lists of qualifications and achievements in order to apply for teaching posts. I must have got these slightly wrong for I always seemed to end up in Ipswich or Wolverhampton rather than at the art school that nestles at the bottom of my road. (Cont.)