I was born fifty years ago. My parents are dead so I will say what I like.
My father was Antonin Vesely, a Jesuit priest from Moravia. He was in Dublin at the Jesuit college and was at first interned as a spy when the war began.
He joined the RAF and became a Squadron Leader and Padre, translating for the Polish and Czech Squadrons. He was a navigator flying in bombers.
My mother was Juliet Francis Godson-Maw, the illegitimate first child of a servant who worked and was abused at the Manor house in a remote Yorkshire village called Nunmonkton. She was abandoned by her mother and left to be raised by her Victorian aunts. Her status was recognised by the people of the Manor house in as much as that she "never wanted for anything". She was sent to London at seventeen to train as a nurse. She was fantastically beautiful. Her face was used as a tooth-paste advert on the tube. She was dressed in expensive stuff from the big house. Men adored and surrounded her.  As a sister in the RAF, she did pioneering work with the famous surgeon McIndoe, who experimented in the treatment of burns on burnt air crew.
My father got a dispensation from the Pope to marry my mother. This meant that he could never go home to Czechoslovakia, as his family would know that he had left the priesthood. He began to teach Classics, but was deemed unqualified to teach by the authorities, so he spent the next twenty five years as a clerk in a factory. Having enough and no more was morally correct to him, but my mother was outraged. She was disappointed at his lack of material ambition, she had expected a better life and to be looked after. They were very poor, and my mother lost her glamour; she couldn't return home to Yorkshire , she didn't want to be seen "in rags".Shr finally went back when she was old, thirty years later. My father's ordination was kept secret from us, his children, until after he died. I don't know why, I think it was just his modesty. My mother said that he had no family, that his sisters had been chased by Germans into the snow, where they had frozen to death. She discarded his past. After the war they were in Birmingham, and when we were born, they were re-housed as "Birmingham overspill" to a council house in Rushall, a village outside Walsall, where they lived in anonymous isolation and fought like cat and dog.

I made observational drawings and drew figures in detail from the age of three. I thought I was an artist as a child. From the age of seven, my brothers and I grew up in Rushall. Walsall was our town, and I made weekly Saturday visits to  the Garman Ryan collection, which was housed in the gallery above our library, and so was accessible to a child visiting the library alone. I grew up with it, and it was important to me because it was the only exhibition I saw until adulthood. My parents' isolation gave us a sense that we were special and somehow romantic and superior. It was an intense and unhappy childhood.
I went to Stafford College of FE to do a Foundation in Art and Design in 1972.
I went to Birmingham Polytechnic in 1974-77 and did a BA in Fine Art. I chose Birmingham in an attempt to re-live those early intense years, and it was magical.

I was Post grad at the Royal College of Art 1979-81 where I got an MA in Painting. I have always painted. I am  influenced by Raphael, Bacon, Delacroix, Degas and Odilon Redon.
The jobs I've had, the shows, contracts, deals and moves around the country describe my life. My work describes me. My vision of the world was formed in the first few years. My nomadic parents liked to walk, my mother in wild places, and my father in cities. I've got a lot of colour memories from these walks and remembered feelings about space defined by architecture, which still feel un-exhausted and un-resolved. The adult development of this results in ideas and feelings about what we are and how we relate physically to the world. That is what I paint about.        
The Czech family traced my father before he died, through the Salvation Army, and I went over as an ambassador to meet people I had been told were dead. (Even then they kept his secret).
They come to see me now, and I'm exhibiting over there.