INTRODUCTION

UNDERWATER WITH MARINE FISH

AVAILABLE PRINTS FOR SALE

ORIGINAL ART FOR SALE

I have seen far more sea fish as a diver than I ever did as an angler.  My trips in pursuit of sea fish were limited to family holidays in Cornwall and one memorable day out from Fleetwood.  This was memorable not for the fish caught but for the fact that to this day I still can't quite believe that it was possible for such a small boat to survive such rough seas without sinking or that one adolescent could spend so much of a day projectile vomiting without turning his stomach inside out. I now live only three miles from the sea and have fished my local patch occasionally, but

prefer to dive whenever conditions are favourable.  My favourite local sites are on the North Pembrokeshire coast, especially in late summer when the visibility is good, the water warm(ish!), and the reefs alive with shoals of sand-eel and sand-smelt, with bass and pollack never far away.  This last summer in particular (2006) I have seen good numbers of bass, mostly schoolies of a pound or so but with the odd bigger fish.  Some fish are definitely curious about a divers presence and will actively come to investigate, but they invariably back off and even bolt out of sight from the stream of bubbles when you exhale.  For this reason my closest ever views of sea fish have been whilst snorkeling and I have had the most success with bass and pollack by lying quietly at the surface in a likely area and waiting for the fish to come to me.  I have found the best

habitat to be shallow rocky gullies over sand, with a mixture of open channels and beds of kelp such as St. Bride’s Bay in Pembrokeshire. One species that doesn't seem to mind the bubbles so much and reminds me in character of a saltwater version of the perch, is the ballan wrasse, a fish that seems as interested in the diver as the diver is in him.  I love to work my way slowly through the kelp beds, enjoying the flickering light in this otherworldly forest and watch for the wrasse that usually break cover to investigate the intruder.  Seeing sea fish at such close quarters has set me wondering about developing some form of underwater angling but I have reached the conclusion that it just wouldn't be cricket!  Seeing fish as regularly as I now do and noting their individual characters has changed my feelings towards them and I now rarely fish, unless it is to get close-up details of a species for reference

The highlight of my diving so far has been off the coast of Ireland where the waters are far richer in life than I have ever encountered off the Welsh coast.  I have swam through vast shoals of sand-eels and jellyfish, and every reef held  hundreds of pollack and big ballan wrasse, whilst in the shallower margins each square yard seemed to be occupied by a pair of corkwing wrasse; and if I snorkeled rather than dived I saw good shoals of big mullet. Another shock in Ireland was the visibility - on my best dives it was over 15 metres and this gives a whole new perspective on the underwater seascape. With all of my painting I feel as though I am still serving an apprenticeship, but this is especially true of my marine work.  As my underwater experiences grow so do the images presented to my mind for future paintings.  I think I am like a lot of artists in hoping that I am given enough time to try and do justice to the wonders of the world that I continue to encounter.

For many years I knew of Bass only through books and magazines but they captured my imagination in a way that few other sea-fish did.  Why this should be so I'm not quite sure but it was the bass chapters in all my books that I returned to again and again. As a young boy on a family holiday in Cornwall I had my first encounter with a real bass and this simply drove the species more deeply into my consciousness.  I was float fishing for blennies when I saw a huge bass hunting the shallows, a fish with a back as broad as a spaniel, its great spiny dorsal fin cleaving the surface.  I nearly fell off my rocky perch, dizzy with excitement, screaming at my brothers to ask if either of them had seen it.   It was not until I was in my thirties that I caught my first bass, whilst on holiday with young children of my own, and I went running back to our cottage to share the momentous news with my nonplussed family.   “Oh, that’s nice dear.” Nice! It was a bass, my first ever bass, the sea-wolf, magnificent ocean predator of storm lashed western shores!  The fact that it was only ten inches long did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for it was as perfect a fish as you will ever see.  I have since caught lots of bass and each one reminds me of that simple joy I experienced as a boy catching a well-conditioned roach.  The fish are so perfectly proportioned, the silver so bright it seems as if the light is generated from within rather than reflected off the scales. During the summer months I dive as often as possible looking for bass, especially off the North Pembrokeshire coast.  Here, amongst the kelp forests with a backdrop so blue that it appears tropical, I have seen lots of bass, some big ones too. I have enjoyed painting them as much as any other species.  The painting ‘Bass and Sand-eels’ was started after one of my first face-to-face encounters almost immediately on returning to the studio, my hair still damp and the taste of the Atlantic on my lips.  This was a painting started with the brush without any preliminary drawings, quickly executed wet into wet with a clear mental picture of my experience as a guide.  Of the queue of pictures filed away in my head for future reference the one I most want to paint is of bass, inspired by watching a large shoal feeding on mackerel.  This was witnessed from a beach in Devon, but I hope that if I dive often enough I might witness a similar event beneath the surface.  Whether I do or not the picture now exists and has a life of its own in my mind’s eye, where I have mentally sketched out a dramatic composition of a group of large bass creating havoc amongst a shoal of panicked mackerel.

pictures of brown trout	atlantic salmon	northern pike	carp fishing	grayling	pictures of perch	pictures of foxes
sea bass	pictures of tarpon	pictures of barn owls	tawny owls	pictures of birds of prey	grey herons	robins
peregrine falcons	deer	pictures of otters	pictures of squirrels	kingfishers	wildlife art prints	bird art prints