I grew up in Belfast, N. Ireland until I was about sixteen when my father was posted to Singapore. Many years later, after a life working around the world in the oil industry, I am retired and living in Houston, Texas. I spend my time between home and Galveston, enjoying being a grandfather, playing amateur photographer and serving as treasurer at my local church – all interspersed with support for the Texas Gulf Coast chapter of Bull Terrier Rescue.
Singapore introduced me to a world very different from Belfast and I fell under the allure of foreign places – just like Kipling’s 10-year soldier
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells: "If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else." No! you won't 'eed nothin' else But them spicy garlic smells, An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
BP supported me through college in Kingston upon Thames, and in the mid 70s, my wife and I with our two young children headed off to Ahvaz in southern Iran. Four years later the Islamic Revolution interrupted that sojourn. We were evacuated to Athens and I joined Mobil Oil who promptly moved us to the USA on a 2-year training assignment. I was working in Pennington, NJ, but we rented (and then purchased) a home just across the Delaware in Washington Crossing, PA. So began our long association with US that culminated in all of us receiving US citizenship. My 20+ years with Mobil was spent on capital projects. These took my family to live in Norway for four years, and after the kids headed for college my wife and I headed three times to live in Japan, a year on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia and ended with two years in Caracas, Venezuela. Those assignments were interspersed with assorted business visits to some of the garden spots of the oil industry in Africa and the Gulf and my frequent flier status rose to “million miler”.
I took the opportunity of the merger between Mobil and Exxon to retire and joined a consulting organization specializing in Technical Due Diligence on behalf of potential investors. Those financiers hired us for an independent assessment of new projects – the contracts, technology, sales plans and environmental impact. My job was to gauge the realism of the developer’s cost forecasts and construction schedule, and practicality of the execution plans. For 15+ years, I travelled around the world to project locations carrying a digital camera. I quickly learnt that it is easier to pontificate on how others should execute projects than it is to lead them yourself. Many of the photographs on this site were captured during those visits.
I intend that these pages will contain my musings on the things that excite, move or provoke me. They are anchored by my interest in photography but I hope that my faith will also become evident.
Hopefully, everything on the site will work as intended. However, I confess to being a dabbler in computer coding. That started back in the 70s with refinery simulations written in Algol, Fortran and Assembler. Nowadays, the scope is different and the languages are HTML and PHP as I try to cajole this WordPress theme to appear on the screen the way it does in my mind’s eye. If you see something is broken, please drop me a note. And, like all would-be artists and bloggers, it is incumbent on me to explain my views. Here, thanks to this helpful site is a succinct (but tongue in cheek) summary of my artistic goals 🙂
My work explores the relationship between multiculturalism and inner visions. With influences as diverse as Camus and Buckminster Fuller, new combinations are created from both constructed and discovered structures. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the endless oscillation of relationships. What starts out as vision soon becomes corrupted into a hegemony of temptation, leaving only a sense of unreality and the inevitability of a new beginning. As intermittent derivatives become frozen through emergent and diverse practice, the viewer is left with an insight into the possibilities of our world.