British painter, born in London. He studied at Westminster School of Art, 1937–8, and at the *Slade School, 1938–40. In 1945 he settled at Zennor, Cornwall (see St Ives School), and he taught at the *Bath Academy, 1951–6. During the decade 1946–56 his work consisted mainly of gouache landscapes, but in 1956 he began painting the abstracts that are his best-known works. They remain tenuously based on nature and have an affinity with the work of Roger *Bissière: ‘The landscape I live among is bare of houses, trees, people; is dominated by winds, by swift changes of weather, by moods of the sea; sometimes it is devastated and blackened by fire. These elemental forces enter into the paintings and lend their qualities without becoming motifs.