Fine Art Acrylics painter. Original Local artist from Bolton.: My artwork. ii

Traditionally, new artists benefit from an abundance of local subjects, like mills, houses, pubs, local people, cultures, with the injection of enthusiasm for painting them, or at least capturing some form of image. I grew up in an area that had been built in the 1950's. A new ring road that by passed the town center.

The property was to small for our growing family, forcing us to move to a newly built, 4 bedroom house, nearer to the town center but without the old pre-war housing stock. Although lots of these houses remained, the majority stood empty, lifeless, derelict. The same could be said for the mills. Just from my house alone, the horizon was filled with these monoliths of industry. Former glorious stalwarts of the Victorian era. At least 15 could be seen in any one direction from my door and turning clockwise. But sadly, they too would be pulled down with the rest of this area, to make way for slightly more contemporary housing, with little gardens and driveways.

Very different from the rows of terraced houses and small back street yards I had first witnessed at 13. This is where my story of art began to take shape. This selection is reproduced from photographs I took as a teen, when all my friends played football on the community center, school grounds or local park. I replaced the black & white images with colour from some of my first watercolour box sets. Although with tentative brush-strokes, exaggeration of colour, I feel I captured the images as lifelike as possible.