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

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

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

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

Reading through such CV's now I see that in no way did they reflect my real existence or document my life. They spoke only of things unimportant to me, news from a grey world. A true chronicle of key events would be quite different, for the great cluster of formative discoveries and unconscious insights occurs in early childhood and is only repeated with variations in later life. Important shifts of awareness become less and less frequent as one goes on: this is the opposite pattern to one's perceived career, a story of ever increasing achievements and higher honours.

Thus this series attempts to redress the balance by exploring, in a sequence of blank verse ruminations and pictorial glosses, the moments when I stumbled upon what has become my 'subject matter', that most important commodity for all artists. I use verse as a dare to myself, having only recently given myself the license to do so independently of another text (e.g. the Inferno). I thought I might be able to match heightened experiences with a heightened style and to be freed by its contraints from dour literalness. In an earthbound version of the same metre the canticles of Curriculum Vitae reflect on the preoccupations of Wordsworth's Prelude, though with more gags. Only CV XX strays from the iambic pentameter and its accompanying couplets. In order to bring the series to a close with a Whitmanesque flourish I experimented with a free alliterative line that echoes the anglo-saxon elegies that I hope one day to translate and put pictures to, such as The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rood.

It takes research to discover the self evident; research conducted in the labyrinthine house of memory of one's own mind. As I sieved my past I found that the seeds of all that obsesses and concerns me in my art and life were all sown much earlier than I had guessed. The couplet which ends CV III and sums up the reveries engendered by a damp spreading mark upon the bedroom wall of my infancy, states the theme clearly,

Implicit in that stain right from the start

was all I've since invented and called Art.