Cultureshock

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Video transcript

When I think back for a moment about myself and what I was doing fifty odd years ago – I was just a scruffy little kid, sometimes playing with my mates or by myself along the coast between Sunderland and South Shields. On the beach and in the sea or rock pools, sometimes climbing the cliffs and doing all those things that little boys are not supposed to do, but still do all the same! I realise now that this is where I got my ideas and inspirations for my paining, from all those colours and shapes, even the sounds of the sea and the shipyards in the distance and the colours of the swirly oily water in the docks and those lovely salty smells of the seaside.

Sometimes I’ll come across a long forgotten sketch that grew into a painting, or I’ll come upon a smudged little doodle that came to nothing. Therefore I have to rely upon my imagination and memories of yesterday and people will say to me ‘What is that?’ You’ll never find anything that shape or colour, well not in this world anyway, but in my memories and imagination I will. It’s all there somehow – even in my other paintings that have nothing to do with the beach.

But I still walk along those cliffs and beaches; they haven’t changed much today, though there is no noise for the shipyards they have long since gone. The river water is clean now. You know its clean water as the anglers now catch fish.

I’d better stop for now for I’m starting to remember many more adventures of a scruffy little ten year old boy and I could probably go on for hours!