My wife Jenny and I moved temporarily to Glasgow from the Isle of Lewis in 1986 to work on designs for the Garden Festival, but when we won the competition to be artists for Princes Square, which was then under construction, we moved permanently.
Shortly after our initial work at Princes Square was completed we were chosen to design the Festive Lights for George Square to celebrate the city becoming European City of Culture. This was quickly followed by working on design detailing at the House for an Art Lover, where construction had just started. This led to us working on a series of gesso panels for the Dining Room, inspired by the work of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. All this and the subsequent public commissions of various kinds, in the UK and abroad, which followed didn’t leave any time for my writing. However, when we started to work on private commissions in our own studio at home, I had more time to write. |
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In school I was immediately in love with the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare, thanks to a brilliant English teacher. Then it was early Wordsworth, Keats, W.B Yeats and Dylan Thomas but I was really hooked when I started to read the Beat Poets, especially Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and Tom Gunn
Now the poets that mean most to me are the Persian Sufis of the 12th and 14th century, especially Rumi, Sa’di and Hafiz. I am also a great admirer of Japanese haikus and haibuns, especially Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. Another major influence is Chinese poetry, which began when I discovered that the Chinese were writing delicate and refined poems, of a deeply philosophical nature, almost three thousand years ago. It was then I realized that we in the West are virtually beginners. After all, Beowulf is only about a thousand years old, and anyway is basically a Scandinavian saga extolling valor in battle. While Shakespeare was writing a mere six hundred years ago. Along the way, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver and Edwin Morgan have become firm favorites. Of contemporary poets, I particularly admire the work of Imtiaz Dharker, but I must say there are a huge number of wonderful poets writing now. |