I was born June 25th 1946 in Melbourne Australia, and have
lived for the past 20 years in Skipton Victoria. I'm a full-time enameller
working chiefly in cloisonné and related techniques, and the repair
and restoration of enamels of various sorts. My stuff (some of it,
anyway) resides in collections in Australia, Bulgaria, West Germany,
Spain, France, Italy, England, The Netherlands, Scotland, South Africa,
the U.S.A., Japan, Israel and Canada.
I came to enamelling by chance. Some twenty years ago I happened to see a commercial exhibition of Chinese enamels - pieces of all shapes, sizes and colours, mainly cloisonné and plique-a-jour. Part of the display was a small `how-to' vase set showing five major steps in making a Chinese-style cloisonné vase. I was hooked and set out with a naive blend of arrogance and ignorance to make cloisonné and there have been few days since in which enamel hasn't played some part. As a teenager working after college (where I was attempting to complete an Applied Chemistry Diploma) for a small firm of stainless-steel fabricators in Moreland, Victoria, I learnt to bang metal about and stick it together in various ways. The techniques I picked up there were invaluable when I started enamelling - almost as useful as the more-recently acquired ability to smell a free glass of riesling at an Opening up to 50 miles away.
Having served with the Royal Australian Engineers in South Vietnam in 1967-68, I was discharged from the army and worked in various places at various jobs for a couple of years before starting at Ford's Melbourne car assembly plant in 1970. I began there in the quality control laboratory as the lowliest possible form of white-collar life, a Vendor Inspector, (other). Later, with the Manufacturing Engineering department I worked in process control with respect to paints, sealers, adhesives, abrasives and other non-metallic materials. After seven years with Ford I left to attend the Australian College of Entertainers fulltime for two years, part-time for a couple more. Having been a pub-singer/guitarist since my early twenties it seemed like a good idea at the time. How successful that particular learning process was is hard to say, but I managed, as a professional entertainer, to more-or-less feed my family.
Working at night gave me the freedom to enamel during the day, and my present income and most of the sustenance for a ravening but fragile ego now comes from enamelling. Neither of my two kids Chris nor Kat has shown signs of enamelling addiction, but each, like me, has made some very good and some very, very bad pieces of cloisonné. Most of their stuff leans towards the abstract but I suspect that as their drawing ability improves, so will their involvement with realism
The focus of my enamelling interest over the last five or six years has been on the repair and restoration of all sorts of enamelled items, most of which has been jewellery.
I find too that an increasing proportion of the stuff I get to fix is antique watch and clock faces, bezels, cases and decorative panels. A variety of karat and non-karat golds, as well as various sterling-like silver alloys were used in case construction; elaborate, often diamond-set cases are great exercises in deductive logic and the prospect of them ending their hitherto long lives as expensive piles of slag on the kiln floor really gets the juices flowing.
Where it’s necessary to replace numerals and minute rings on watch or clock faces or the external chapters of pocket watches, I initially hand-drew 10x masters in india ink which were scaled down for photolithographic reproduction in ceramic inks. More recently I’ve been using Adobe Illustrator to build up a library of scalable micro-detailed numerals and rings, and am investing in the means of making my own numerals and dial bases.
I'm working towards making one-off reproduction antique watch and clock faces in vitreous enamel from scratch for a sensible price, and having sorted out most of the technical problems, should be supplying the market in the near future.
I get to make a few pieces of interesting jewellery and one or two commissioned panels each year, and I’m currently working on a couple of very finely-detailed photoetched pieces.
