The fantasy world and the real world

 

Dhekelia, Cyprus, 1981

Born in 1969 at the former RAF Hospital Wegberg near the city of Mönchengladbach, I spent a wandering childhood living at various British military bases and housing estates in West Germany, Cyprus and England. I also lived with my grandparents in Scotland for a brief period and went to school there.

I saw many things during these sometimes interesting but you could say somewhat traumatic and even demented upheavals. Definitely not a "normal childhood".

Swimming in the warm waters of the eastern Mediterranean in 1983 - wearing diving fins and face mask, breathing through a snorkel whilst clutching a three pronged spear gun - hunting fish and octopus - I had no inkling that 11 years later I would be living in a dusty post-communist Polish town in Lower Silesia, recently opened up to The West. All the result of a random family holiday to the Tatra Mountains in August 1990 because of a Polish connection - my grandad, veteran of The Battle of Monte Cassino, 1944.

I studied Engineering Physics at Sheffield City Polytechnic in the years 1988-1992, with a so-called sandwich placement spent working in a darkened optics lab at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, 1990-1991.

But I abandoned the world of physics in 1992, eventually moving to Poland in 1994 in search of Bohemian adventure and to learn the Polish language.

After long days teaching English I would immerse myself in environments with people, often students, who knew no English at all. In this way I learnt to speak Polish within a few years.

In 1997 I rediscovered a deep interest in photography - documenting the rapidly changing streets of Poland. I had previously taken a ton of travel photos during my visit to the USA in 1989.

After 2 seismic events - the death of Pope John Paul II and the accession of Poland to the EU, I returned to the UK in 2005. It is a decision I regret, but life goes on. The portal and path to one parallel universe closed forever, and another opened to pass through. 

On 17 Dec 2009 I purchased a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch on Amazon.co.uk and hence began my venture into digital art.

I upgraded this in October 2010 with a Wacom Intuos4 Small A6 Graphics Tablet.

Of course I'm not a "real/professional/trained" artist, explorer, photographer or storyteller, nevertheless on this blog you can see some of my digital art and pen or pencil drawings from the fantasy world and photography from the real world. My heart or soul is there at least.

Likewise here are some of my writings from the imagination as well as the real world.