THE EARLY DAYS

I have always wanted to be an artist. Ever since my mother sat me down in front of the television to watch Sketch Club with Adrian Hill. I was both mesmerised and inspired. That as 1959 and I was just four years old.

In 1969 I won a school art prize – a signed copy of A Beginners Guide to Oil Painting by none other than Adrian Hill.

I still have it to this day.

THE BEST OF DAYS

I spent my school days at Kingswood  School in Bath. They were indeed the best of days. Having successfully evaded both the classroom and the sports fields in favour of the art room, it is little wonder then that school would give way to art college.

On leaving Kingswood in the summer of ’73 I spent the next four years at Birmingham and Loughborough Art Colleges studying Graphic Design.

…AND WHAT A TIME IT WAS

The 1970’s marked a period of cultural upheaval. It was very much a time of exceptional creativity; it was an exciting period for both the advertising and design industries. Not surprisingly, it is a decade often described as ‘the golden age of advertising’ and London was its engine room.

So, with portfolio in hand, I headed south to seek employment. I founded in an art studio providing illustration, visualising, design and artwork services to the media world, a studio called Pens.

In  the words of Simon and Garfunkel ‘Time it was. And what a time it was’. A time when I was so lucky to learn so much from so many truly talented ‘commercial’ artists.

1984

In 1984 I founded The January Design Partnership with two very good friends James Young and Jim Henderson, the later being my first and last boss.

When we sold the business some years later James went on to join the Born Free Foundation in Ethiopia saving lions whilst I went on to found The Sutton Young Design Partnership in the wilds of London’s  Soho. It was 1992.

28 YEARS

Over the following 28 years, Sutton Young went from strength to strength winning numerous awards for its creativity, design and marketing expertise in a variety of disciplines, most notably for its place-making and branding work for clients such as Canary Wharf, Kings’s Cross and the Duke of Westminster’s  Grosvenor Estate.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

I retired in 2020 with the aim of going back to college to study portrait painting at the Barnes Atelier. Covid cut that opportunity short and I then enrolled at Heatherleys, the oldest art college in the country to further my portraiture studies.

NOWADAYS

Nowadays, when I am not painting in my studio, I can be found, on a weekly basis, at the National Gallery observing some of the worlds greatest artists or wandering the Surrey wilderness with the Surrey Hills Plein Air Painters.

I reside in Weybridge with my wife Liz and our two fur babies, Tita and Rafferty. Our three children have all grown up and flown the nest.