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

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

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

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

Many other writers are invoked or alluded to and well-known poems are plundered, not merely to add gracious touches, but rather to play a part in the sustenance of the great European tradition where men of letters have been able to count on a common stock of classics that they may confidently refer to (though perhaps such cultural markers went the way of the red telephone boxes, to be replaced like them with trumpery and more transient looking models). A typical conflation occurs at the end of CV IV where Marlowe's

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

gets married to Yeats;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium

and twisted to make

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To haunt the topless bars of Ilium

The pictorial surrounds gradually formed, as well as the accompaniment to the text, a catalogue of the modes in which I have painted.

Not only did I find the source of later work in the games, fads, fantasies and obsessions of childhood, and, in my early relationships to cricket, food or dolls, the mirror of my present artistic behaviour, but I gradually revealed (to myself at least) a larger arch of metaphor in the set as a whole; a self-portrait in the image of a moral journey, purposive for all its dilly dallying on the way. I am the van I follow. I sing of roots and fruits.

Note: The first versions of Curriculum Vitae I, II, and III were shown at the Royal Academy in 1986 and these were shown again with IV, V, and VI at the Angela Flowers Gallery in March/April 1987. Second versions were made of I-VII in order to make the set more uniform and to give me the opportunity of revising the earlier panels in the light of the later. CV I-IX form the basis of a BBC2 programme (Artist's Eye) directed by Jake Auerbach with some interference, especially in the editing, by myself.

Curruculum Vitae XX, which seems to end the series was still being completed in the Spring of 1992 when this essay was revised: thus they have occupied almost seven years.

Work and Texts (1992),  pp. 24-35.