Transcript
Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this
is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious
and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being.
Hello everybody, so this is the third in my talking therapy sessions which are interviews
with artists and creatives. This one’s with Rob, he’s a really really interesting guy.
He goes by the moniker The Painting Nomad. He doesn’t stay in one place for very long and
he’s not technologically particularly up to date and therefore we had various challenges in
recording this episode since we are located in different places. And so after battling
with technology for quite some time I ended up cobbling together a solution so I could at least
capture something but the sound quality is is not good which is a real shame because this was such
an interesting interview and he’s a really interesting guy but I believe you can hear
everything it’s not always as clear as it could be in some places. I lost him entirely towards the
end he was just breaking up because of poor network so if the off-ramp to this episode seems
a little bit cobbled and rushed and that’s because I had to piece it together from what little bits of
communication we were able to. But otherwise I think it’s a really amazing interview so I hope
you enjoy it. I have another interview lined up which will be out in the next week or two
so watch this space and otherwise I’ll see you soon. Hello everybody I’m here with Rob Parkinson
aka The Painting Nomad whose story is somewhat surprisingly even more interesting than his
moniker. Rob would usually be found rambling the highways and byways of the UK but since
it’s late December he’s someplace warmer than his usual home which is a tent. Hi Rob where are you
coming to us from today? I’m up in Durham, hi Alex. And how come you find yourself there? One of my
customers who used to be just a customer now is a very very good friend. He’s collected quite a few
paintings and he had basically a spare house so him and his lady friend of partner they got
together and moved into his house and her house was left spare and instead of renting it out
they’ve just sort of been sat on it. When I got to a point where last year I finished doing a
specific project and he just said if you want the keys to this house you can have them come and move
in look after it. So he was on the border of because it’s near to Scotland and I was looking
to go into Scotland to do some work up there then it worked out perfectly and I’ve been here
for about a year now using it as a base going backwards and forwards to different places.
And so it’s nice and warm and and you’re not that far from me so I’m guessing it’s about as gloomy
as it is outside for you as it is for me. Why don’t you tell us your story and why you usually
find yourself in a tent? It’s quite a long story if I was to take about 11 years. I’m a full-time
artist now. I’m a full-time oil painter. I’ve been painting since 2014 full-time. Just to put
it into context I paint mainly landscapes seascapes and it’s kind of a documentary of my travels.
That’s the main context and what I do and it kind of began around about 2014. I’ve been working in
a job for quite some time. I moved around quite a bit. I’ve moved to London. I’ve moved
from been originally born in Manchester but moved down to Bournemouth. So I was in Bournemouth at the
time and I’ve been working for it. It was a really good job. I really enjoyed the company and I love
the people that I was working with but it was a nine-to-five. I was working full-time and I started
to feel myself getting very stressed with it. It was something that was it was a kind of a grind
that I found the nine-to-five. I’m not very good at the nine-to-five thing. I’ve always been
creative. I’ve always been somehow involved in the arts from an early age. Mostly music as it goes
in my very earlier days. I was in bands quite a lot. I did move to London and I took up music
professionally and I was working making music for films. That was a main thing that I was doing in
London which was fantastic. I absolutely loved it. I do play several instruments and I do quite a crazy
thing called foley art which is making the sound effects for films. So when a door goes slam
it’s like with two pieces of wood and a microphone. So if you imagine all the film sounds that you get
I did that live. So it was making music and sound effects live to film. So that was a very cool
creative out for me and I loved it but living in London I found that that was very taxing.
The chaos of London, the hectic lifestyle, the fact that you can earn good money but you spend it
just as quick is a lot of pressure. I found that when I came back to Bournemouth just for one visit
I went to visit the sea and the coast and I suddenly felt this incredible weight lifting off me
and I didn’t realise at the time but I’d been becoming really depressed in London. I had been
like really feeling it as not being in nature, not having natural surroundings. There were no
flat horizons in London. Everything is broken up. It was quite a thing that I found. As soon as I
saw the flat horizon of the sea it was the first time I’d seen that since two years and I just
realised that that’s something that I really needed in my life. I actually coined the phrase
flat horizon deficiency. So if you live in cities and towns and everything and you don’t have that
flat horizon it can kind of bring you down and it’s a massive boost when you do get that.
So I made a conscious decision to move back to Bournemouth even though the London scene for me
was fantastic and I loved being in the music but I couldn’t live with continually going down and
down so I moved and I was in this job and as mentioned it was brilliant company, brilliant
people but the nine to five I wasn’t doing very well with it. It was grinding me down yet again
because I need to be creative and I was starting to put quite a few things together
knowing that yes I need to be in nature or around close to nature especially the sea
and I need to be creative more than just for an hour or two in the evening so I have to finish
work. In 2013 I bought myself a camper van. I got a little VW T4 and I absolutely loved it.
As soon as I finished work I was jumping in that and going off exploring, I go to the beach,
I go into the forests, I put an old mattress in the back in a sleeping bag and some cooking
stuff and I started staying overnight in places and this was way back in 2013 before the major
vandalized scene had exploded which is massive now. This was at a time where people were kind
of thinking I was a bit of an idiot wanting to go out and live in my van for two or three days at
a time but I loved it, absolutely loved it and I got to the point where I realized that I was
spending more time in my camper van over the week than I was in my really nice flat that I had
and I kind of thought this is this is now something that I thought about and I thought
I could move into my van, I could move into it full time and it would cost me a hell of a lot
less than what I’m spending. I mean it’s costing me a thousand pounds a month just to have a flat
and essentially it was just a very expensive storage unit for things that I didn’t need or use
so another conscious decision I thought I’m going to try this, I’m going to give my flat up, I’m
going to move into my van and I literally over the course of two months I handed my noticing to my
landlord. I gave most of my possessions away, I put a few special bits into storage and that was it.
I moved into my van with a couple of bin bags of stuffed bag of clothes, still had the old mattress
in the back in a cooking stove and off I went and I started living full time in my little camper van
but I was still going to work and I was still doing the nine to five things so I was hoping to
go back to that same base five days a week to keep up with the work and even though I was having
a fantastic time in the evenings, the weekend, I just realised that I needed to be in that
environment more, I needed to get away from the hamster wheel so to speak so I realised that my
wages that I was earning, I was saving quite a bit but I didn’t need the money, the only money
that I needed was enough to get by, enough food and fuel and a little bit extra just in case
and I thought I could get by on £300 a month, I don’t need this big paycheck so why am I doing
this job? So I tried to sort of come up with an idea of thinking how can I come up with a plan
to creatively fund my lifestyle and I’ve always been into painting since I was very young.
I got seriously into painting while I was in my late teens, early twenties and I did a lot of
painting, got into oil painting especially, all quite abstract and quite experimental but
I did it a lot and I’ve always painted at some point and I thought I wonder if I came up with
this plan of painting a little painting, a little oil painting of wherever I was traveling to
in my camp event, could be the beach, could be the forest, it could be somewhere away,
if I just came up with one painting every day and then put them online and if people bought them
and I was making, even if it was just £15 or £20 a day for each one of those paintings then
that would be enough for my food, my fuel and whatever I needed. So I planned that and I put
the date to say on the 1st of January 2014 I’m going to begin that project. So I was only planning
to stay in the van traveling around living in it over the summer so I thought when it gets to
winter it’s just going to be obviously too cold. Back then you couldn’t get Chinese diesel heaters
or it was very expensive to get a heater that time and I thought if you’ll get to the winter,
see what it’s like, I’ll get to October. But I realized that I’d acclimatized, started to
acclimatize to the cold, it was quite a strange phenomenon. I didn’t realize that you could
kind of like as soon as it starts gradually getting colder your body kind of gets used to it
and I did and everybody else was wearing thick coats and comforts and two pairs of trousers and
I was still walking around in the t-shirt shorts thinking it’s just a bit strange but it’s okay.
So I carried on into the winter and when it got to the 1st of January I had actually previously
told on Facebook and on the Facebook groups that I’m going to do this project of painting a day
and explained about it and I set up a blog with the help of a friend and on the 1st of January
I went to a New Year’s Eve party at a pub in Dorset, famously the square and compass pub,
and the next morning around about midday I opened the back of the van up and I just painted a picture
a little tiny seven inch by five inch oil painting of the fields surrounding the back of the car
pub and I thought I’ve actually done the first paint and I put that on the blog and I put it
online so here’s painting number one and I did a little write-up as to what it was and where I’d
been, a little story behind it. The next day I did, we had the day off work because I was still
working at the time and I went off and I did another painting and the third day I had to go
to work, back at work again, but in the evening as soon as I finished I got back in the van and
the first thing I did was did another little painting, I actually painted seven that I found
on the cuff, so that was three and then four, five, six, seven paintings that got done and I
was continuously putting these online and writing up the blog, posting up paintings onto Facebook
and for my surprise it started to really gather momentum very very quickly
and a lot of people were messaging getting in touch and then people did start to say are these
paintings for sale which for me was that was the holy grail of what I was looking for and I thought
the best way to sell these I don’t want to put a price because I don’t know what they’re worth,
I couldn’t price the work so I decided just to put them on eBay and I set up an eBay account
and I put all of the paintings on by the time I’d done that I had 10 paintings so I’d done 10 days,
10 paintings, I put them all on eBay, I put them with no reserve, I put them at a star price of
99p and just let people bid on them and decide what they thought were worth and I thought if I
get 15, 10 or 15 quid for each one I’d be really happy and it got to the end of the seven days
of the auction and some of them were going up to 30 some 40 and I had 10 of these up and by
the end of the auction they all ended on the same day and I made something like 300 quid
and I thought that’s exactly what I need. I couldn’t believe it to be honest, I was
surprised but absolutely elated of course and I was carrying on by the time it got to the end of
January obviously that’s 31 paintings I’ve done and each one of those are all sold so I was
starting to put them on daily auctions so every day there was an option and it would finish and
seven days time and they were all selling. By the middle of February I was earning the same amount
that I was earning at my full-time job so I spoke to my employers and I thought and I asked them
and I said is it okay if I just hand my letters in give two weeks and can I just go and they gave
me their blessing instead of course so I worked out my two weeks job and by the end of February
I left my job when I found myself in the position of being a full-time painter which was a dream
come true and I was still selling I was still painting the painting a day and by the end of
March I had driven my van down to the south of France and I was selling paintings from the back
of my van on the beach in the south of France to people in the UK so that was how I began
and that I mean to bring it back to the mental health thing I took myself from quite a depressed
state of thinking that I was literally I thought I was going through a cross between a midlife
crisis and just needed an adventure and I put those two things together and mixed it all up
with some creativity and then created what essentially is my dream job and that’s how I
began becoming a painter. Since then I travelled thousands and thousands of miles in my van
I went from place to place all I needed was the internet so that I could put paintings online
and I could have my PayPal account set up I could put the auctions on eBay I could post work up I
could write the blog about what I was doing and I would get the money and all of the painting
sold some for a little there were a fair few that did just go for the 99p but some went for 60 to 80
cut so it all balanced out that lasted for a long time it was six seven nearly eight years
that I was doing that consistently I was travelling in various places I was going to Cornwall I was
going through Devon all along the south coast I spent four months in France which was just an
incredible experience it was beautiful. Do you speak French? I don’t speak brilliant French but
I speak okay French and I can get by. It’s quite strange when you’re in France or when I was there
I took the basic French that I knew and suddenly found myself getting better literally by every
few days I was finding myself getting better I think if I’d have stayed for six months or a year
I’d got pretty fluent at it but yeah when you’re immersed in it and the only thing you can do is
speak and listen to French then you do get you start to survive a bit better each day so yeah
it’s not not too bad it’s got rusty again but everything was great up until we hit the pandemic
so we we got to the pandemic back in 2019 2020 yeah into 2019 yeah so the pandemic that hit in
2019 and I was lucky that I had a place to park my van which was on a farm in Dorset in a place
called Perbeck I’ve been staying at Perbeck a lot it was I was using it as a base because it is
stunningly beautiful place in the south on the south coast it’s got the place called the
it’s got the Jurassic Coast which stretches from Pearl Harbor all the way along through down into
Devon and all of that is just stunning beautiful stretch of coastline so the pandemic I found
myself grounded I couldn’t go out I couldn’t visit places I couldn’t go in into favorite
locations and paints I was stuck in one place I was very lucky to have the place and the farm
that I was staying at and I had the top floor of the other barn to use the studio so still working
but as it goes as things happen I did get involved with a lady and it was when there
was gaps in the pandemic we had a gap in it before it went back into lockdown again and we got
together and ended up I ended up moving in with her but we got on so well it was brilliant
we then moved out of there and we moved to Glastonbury together and we both had vans at
that point so we had his and hers camper vans which was brilliant so we moved to these allotments
in Glastonbury beautiful place again we were so lucky to have that they they were happy to
have us there because we were kind of like guardians a little bit of security kind of thing
talking of mental health through allotments were for people with either mental health issues or
special needs and so they could get a day or two days in there to do gardening which is incredibly
therapeutic kind of like a self-help area where people could get together and just do gardening
it was beautiful so my girlfriend and I stayed there for a while and then I had a bit of a
disaster and we went to see her parents up in Swindon I drove my van up there when we were driving
back it was late at night it was raining we were going around a corner I was totally under the
speed limit but there was a bit of an idiot had parked on the other side of the road and someone
in a land rover with a trailer on the back came up behind that car went to overtake it and didn’t
really see me coming so I ended up slamming the brakes on didn’t stand a chance and slammed head
on into the trailer at the back of this land rover and flipped the trailer over completely smashed
the front of my van in and it was a total rise off that was devastating absolutely devastating
yeah well I feel extremely lucky that neither myself and my girlfriend got any serious
damage ourselves or injuries but my van was completely written off it was totaled
bearing in mind it was my pride and joy anyway but the history behind that vehicle was wasn’t it
was more than just a ban to me it’d been my home for years it had been the beginning of a project
yeah I did lose it quite badly after that I was very good on the outside I kept it together on
the outside but on the inside it I started to go downhill quite quite quickly the insurance payout
was terrible they’ll go all out to give you the best insurance possible when you go to claim
then it’s just ridiculous I didn’t get I got about two-thirds of what my van was worth
because it was in the pandemic I went in to buy another van another VW camper van
but van prices have gone absolutely through the roof at that point I just really didn’t know what
to do I was really depressed at that point that that had a lot of strain on the relationship
I just wanted to be alone I just wanted to disappear somewhere so I did and I had to break
up for for her um my sanity I decided to just leave and I landed on my feet a little I was
lucky that some friends endorsed it they were renting out a an old converted coach on their
land and I moved into that and I stayed in that coach it had a great big wood burner had a cooker
big double bed at the back really lovely people beautiful land and I stayed there over winter
had a great time I found myself getting back into the swing of of painting again after the crash
I practically stopped painting I wasn’t earning much money we got a bit of a payout from the
government being self-employed so that was basically just what I lived on I didn’t have
that spark of creativity I felt I’d lost it but when I was in that coach I found that coming back
again and I started painting a lot more again I was so lucky that my customers and people that
were seeing the paintings were still there and they still wanted to buy and I started making a
bit of money again which was great they rented that coach out under the provision that it was only
until I believe it was June the following year so so I did leave in June and I went and stayed
at a friend’s house again I was without a vehicle I was a bit kind of lost I didn’t know what I was
doing losing that camper van I mean that really was the crux of the kind of downhill travel for
me and I spent a couple of months staying with my really lovely friend in Dorchester and just it was
just something nagging away at me thinking I’ve got to do something I’ve got to get out of this
rut and there was something in the back of my mind and it is very strange when ideas manifest
themselves they kind of you get inspiration from different places you don’t just have an idea and
go I’m going to do that it’s you get a little bit of a fragment from here a little bit of an
inspiration from there those things kind of like start coming together and then this this idea
forms and manifests itself and literally just won’t go away and that idea was to go and walk
the south force coast path which if people know about it it’s become a lot more well known in
recent years especially from the book The Soul Path which is going to come out as a film next
April as it goes but the the south force coast path it’s a continuous path it’s the longest
continuous path in the UK which traditionally stretches from Minehead in North Somerset
goes all the way down the coast of North Cornwall round Land’s End and all the way along the south
coast to Poole and it’s 630 miles in total I just thought I really want to do that I want to walk
the south force coast path my housemate that I was renting from she she goes I’ve got a rucksack here
you can use and I went thanks very much I bought myself some boots I got a few bits of camping
equipment I bought a tent off of ebay and I basically just had nothing other than that
I thought I’m going to take painting gear but how do I do this because I can’t take easels and
canvases and whatever and I had a bit of a brainstorm with a friend of mine and he actually
came up the idea why don’t you just take single sheets of canvas get a roll of canvas cut some
single sheets out of it and somehow paint on those so I did devise this this plan what I essentially
used is a just a flat piece of cardboard that I could spray glue the sheet of canvas to and I
invented a drying box with which was about two inches deep which the canvas would sit in and
it would have a ridged lid on it so that the top of the box couldn’t touch the canvas so I could
carry wet oil paintings with me so oil paintings take well depending on how thick you lay the paint
on they can take months to dry but they were presumably still taking quite a while to dry
while you were carrying them around um firstly I used a quick drying oil paint griffin alkyd
it’s um it’s by Windsor and Newton it’s griffin alkyd oil paint I swapped out some of the slower
drying colors for those some of some colors dry naturally quite quick but some take a long time
like cambium red sap green uh ivory black uh cambium yellow those colors can take quite a long
time to dry but if you swap them out for griffin alkyd then they dry literally within a day to two
days I did a trial run did one painting I put it in the box I left it by the next day it dried
I also use a lot of titanium white um and that tends to get mixed in with a lot of other things
when you’re toning down um with with oil paintings so I use griffin alkyd um in the titanium white
so you’re actually adding a drying medium a quick dry medium into the paints that are slow drying
anyway so that sped up the drying process loads so literally the first of september I had my bag
packed I got 60 sheets of canvas in a box I packed my oil paints in um I needed a jar of white spirit
with some spare white spirit I needed brushes um I had all of that in the bottom of my rucksack
and then all the other things I had I just had the trousers I was wearing three pairs of socks
a t-shirt a jacket um a tent some cooking gear and a sleeping bag and a couple of other bits
and bobs like obviously a torch you know and that was it I believe I had 220 pounds in the bank
that was all I had I went to Lidl’s and I got a bag of shopping and my housemate took me down
gave me a hug and said off you go and I just trotted it off down the beach I only got 500 yards
because it was in the evening I only walked 500 yards and then picked my tent in the sandgene
cooked up some food watched the sun go down and went to sleep and uh yeah the next morning I woke
up very early 5 30 as it was september the 2nd um and I thought I am now on the south west coast
path so here we go so you set off on this expedition with a tent really on the cusp of
winter right september things are going to start to change how long did you expect it to take it’s
supposed to take about two months if you do it properly if you do it daily three months if you’re
not very fit and so I thought september to the end of october you know going into november it’s not
too bad I found out very very quickly indeed that weight is a massive issue well however much
weight you’re carrying is a big big issue I didn’t realize but um essentially the ideal
weight for carrying hiking gear is that I think it’s about a third of your body weight is the
maximum and I was carrying 22 kilos so I’m not completely sure how much your weight but 22 kilos
is a lot for anybody and I realized very quickly because I was walking on the beach
which is actually the most difficult terrain to walk along the beach I got to the first bin
that I found along the beach and I started decanting things out of my bag and certain
food items that I thought I’m not going to eat this within the next three or four days
and I just need to get with as much weight as possible yeah that first day of walking that
I hit the first hill which goes up to old harry rocks and you know I had a walking pole with me
and I’m glad I did trying to get up that very first hill with that backpack on
I then realized that I was very unfit I wasn’t I wasn’t fit at all at every hundred yards I
was stopping and wheezing and out of breath but I got to the top of the hill and I got to old
harry rocks which is the first landmark I think that was seven and a half miles I managed on
the first day and I was absolutely shattered I managed to find a little place to pitch my tent
just above the beach spent the night there and the next morning I woke up it was early I got
the sunrise and I thought I’m going to do a painting let’s get this underway and I got the
painting gear out and I painted the first painting and it was just basically a sunrise with the beach
next day carried on and every day just did a painting but I couldn’t believe it because
within a few days I’d walked 40 miles along that coast and I felt myself starting to get a bit
fitter and amazingly and this is the most important thing is I felt a massive amount of relief
like all the stress and the pressure and the things that had happened previously
had just been listed off me like a like a weight it’s a bit of a cliche but I felt alive I felt
enthusiastic about what I was doing sitting in a field overlooking the sea and just watching the
butterflies just having a rest drinking water it’s the simplest thing in the world but I felt
so happy knowing that I was doing the paintings and I had all of this experience to look forward to
yet again I started posting these paintings online I started taking video blogs with myself
a videoing where I was showing people the locations and that started to become really
popular I was getting a lot of hits a lot of facebook views soon enough people started asking
how much of the paintings are these for sale so instead of e-baying them I just put a message out
saying here’s all the paintings I’ve done so far I’ve done 10 at that point said here they all are
here’s how many miles they are of the path so far here’s the locations and I just put them all up
for sale at £80 each and I said instead of paying the £80 you can pay £50 as a reserve
to reserve the painting and then hold £30 back and then if you allow me to keep hold of the
paintings then when I finish the walk I’ll frame it exhibit all of them as a show and then I’ll
post it to you and very kindly everyone that offered to buy the paintings said but that’s fine
keep hold of them so I suddenly found myself getting painting sales at £50 each just for
doing a walk and painting and painting each day and I started to get into the routine of painting
paintings every day or as near to every day as I could and then on a Sunday I’d have a rest
and go into an establishment like a pub or a cafe I’d go online put all the paintings up
list them say what was for sale and then I’d suddenly within an hour I’d have sold either
most of them or one of them and they all sold I was in heaven and it got through to November
that was in 2021 and that was when the massive storms hit and I did battle through the storms
and I didn’t do very well with it I was on the cliff tops it was getting really dangerous
I had a couple of smashed tent nights where my tent just got absolutely demolished and then
on the the third time that that happened it was I was scared because I was absolutely soaking wet
it was getting close to zero degrees and I thought this I think I’ve come to the end of this chapter
so I took a break and I went back I was lucky to go back to the coach for that winter again
in Dorchester and as soon as it got to July the next year I got back on the path from where I
finished and then began again so that was St Ives I’d got as far as St Ives which was 415 miles
in the first leg so yeah I actually spent four months and the second leg of just going from
St Ives all the way up to my head because I found myself loving it so much that I didn’t want it to
end so whenever I got to certain locations that I felt comfortable that I was out of the way that I
could pitch my tent that nobody knew and there was enough supplies nearby like a shop in some
somewhere that I could get online easily I might stay there for three or four days even a week at
a time again doing the paintings absolutely loving it they were all selling I finished the walk
on the 22nd of October 2022 I went back to Dorchester I arranged to have an exhibition
of all the paintings that I’d sold and created and I was very lucky to get a spot ironically at
Dalston Castle which was the very first place that I stayed in when I began the walk so they offered
me what’s called the Belvedere Suite on the top floor which was had 360 degree panoramic of the
area of the coast I hosted an exhibition there and I painted by that time it’s 147 paintings
of which documented the entire San Francisco’s path from my perspective and I lined them up
along the wall so that they were in chronological order loads of people came the comments were
fantastic everybody seemed to really enjoy the show it’s incredibly humbling and that was the
culmination of the project that had taken me approximately two years so I’d never had an
exhibition before I’d put paintings in in in a pub you know but I’d never had a proper
solo exhibition so for me that really hit the nail on the head for my personal humble achievement
that I set out to do that extend from having these mental health issues of depression not
knowing what to do with myself suffering loss going through that and thinking well creativity
that’s how I get through I need to be creative I need to be doing something that is crazy
and if I’m not I know that I will start to go back down that slope again so it’s a huge thing
for me and it’s something that’s set in stone for life for me now I’ll always be painting
I’ll always be making music and I have to keep remembering that if I do stop doing it
the ladder is presented in front of me and I can either go down it or I can start creating again
so it’s a it’s a fantastic kind of like benchmark to know if you start feeling a bit
dodgy with yourself then stop what you’re doing go and paint the picture yeah yeah I mean it’s
the same for me my studio is my refuge and I have to be painting and when I’m not I just descend
really quickly so I fully get that so you’ve since done a trip around summer Scotland
I have yeah um I again when I finished the walk I started to I finished the exhibition
and I did that I found myself in the same place again I was like what we’re going to do now
I’m a bit lost now but I gathered myself up and I thought as soon as the weather starts to get a
bit warmer I’m going to hit Scotland and I’m going to hike through I’m going to paint the heights
that’s been a dream that I’d wanted to do for a long time as well so that coincided with the
incredibly generous offer from my lovely friends that said if you want keys to this house you
see Durham and I thought Durham that’s close to Scotland so I jumped at the chance of accepting
the key and moved up here to this lovely lovely property they say that I’m doing them a favour
by looking after it and essentially I’ve just commandeered it and said it into a painting
studio today I thought love because they they’ve had loads of paintings of me I hiked through
Scotland I spent two and a half months I didn’t paint as many paintings as went on the coast
path I did I think it was about 28 but again most of those sold very very different of the
coast path because of one the weather it would rain for two or three days in the trot is a lot
colder at times and then suddenly it’s making hot so it’s very difficult to plan internet reception
is has a lot to be decided so that there’s quite a few factors that did stand in my in my way
again I plan to do it I did it loved it I’m planning to go back to do the Edwardian way
when it gets warm again but that’s next year because I do look back and when you’re thinking
have I really done anything have I have I achieved anything yes painting paintings is a lovely thing
to do at the humbleness again I had to keep going back to that because when people do so
that they love what you’re doing and they said I gave that to my my family member as a gift and
they absolutely love it that’s a special place that you painted and they’ve now got a permanent
reminder of it from you you know that that’s amazing it’s an amazing feeling that makes you
feel so good I kept a pretty good catalogue um over time and I think it’s total tooth it’s just
over 2200 that I’ve painted and I sold so that’s just over 11 years those aren’t going anywhere
they’ll continue to be there forever so that’s something that is amazing to think about that’s
kind of like needing a legacy of where I’ve traveled to where I’ve been because all of these
paintings literally just document where I’ve traveled and my personal perspective of how
amazing the world is about how amazing the coastline is special little things like a robin
coming and sitting on a twig next to you thank you robin you know immortalizing yeah well it’s
an amazing travelogue right I mean who can say they’ve you know done something like that and
2000 paintings well yeah I’m pretty prolific but I don’t I don’t think I’m anything close to that
um but uh so that’s actually incredible you’re you’re paintings themselves
are they all 12 by 12 inch is that right um no they vary wildly the ones I did on the coast path
they were all eight inch by eight inch um and they were single pieces of canvas which I then
mounted and framed and the frames themselves went to 12 inch by 12 inch so they were a floating
frame and just to note um I found that the frames were so expensive to buy if I wanted 140 frames
that’s a lot of money yeah to the thousands of pounds yeah so I actually I was kind of forced
and coerced by friends to go down the route of buying the frame material myself buying all the
hard boards buying all the mounting card and then I spent a week making all the frames in a garage
so I had to cut 147 times four whatever that is 600 of the uh edges but to cut those with
40 90 degree angles super glue all those angles together and then cut out 147 squares out of
147 pieces of card so so that’s um that’s a lot harder than I think most people think just getting
a clean 45 degree angle uh out of a piece of wood is is actually you’ve got to have a
decent mitre saw or whatever and and you’re like a fragment out like and it’s not going to go
together ever right and I’ve tried this before and I’ve wasted so much wood luckily not like
expensive framing wood but like I’ve wasted so much wood getting this wrong and I just gave up
I’ve got this guy who sort of helps me out with woodwork stuff he just laughs at me I’ll just
take it around his house now and say Mike can you saw this for me because I ain’t doing it
yeah I worked on that I was getting up at seven in the morning I was starting work at eight
and I was finishing well into the night time so nine ten o’clock at night and I did I was I did
that for um about a week because I only found out that I had the exhibition a week before I had it
so I then realized that I had to get all of this work framed within a week and I finished framing
them the day before the exhibition well that’s how close it was but yeah that was 10 hour days
amazing yeah the music so I spotted they um an instagram video of you playing a song about a seal
did you write that I think you wrote that right oh yeah yeah I wrote that for a friend of mine
that I was seeing for a while she she used to go surfing and there’s a seal that always used to
visit her when she was surfing so I’ll write her a song I went um swimming in the sea brave old me
in Scotland in place called Montrose bit sort of northeast coast I had a wet suit on I’m not that
stupid um and the seal just popped up and was just staring at me it was really weird and then
in the background there was all these dolphins like you’re probably about a mile away but you
could see these dolphins cavorting in the uh in the ocean it was quite simply one of the most
magical moments of my life I was like you know this stuff doesn’t happen but
it’s all here folks in Scotland uh blimey yeah I mean just to go back to music I grew up on
making music it’s a very very strong passion of mine um I did the rock and roll thing I stood on
stage and rocked out with a really cool band for four or five years um but when I moved to London
the making music for films that that was wonderful it’s something that I really want to get back into
at some point um I have done some now and again but that’s uh we played some amazing venues
again we did the VNA we did I played it take modern the British Museum really quirky venues
like museums and libraries and stuff the British library we played the cabinet of living cinema
the guy that founded that was living in London he used to be the violin player or the viola player
in an old band that I was playing in but he left and moved to London so when I moved to London
he got in touch with me and said you move to London do you want to get involved with this
new project that started up which was made re-scoring the music for films and playing it
live so I began that with him um and that grew very quickly that was a really cool project
and it ended up with we’d have anything up to 20 musicians on the books that we could bring in
to do various instruments for various films yes the band in London that was amazing um but again
I mean just to reiterate from the reasons I left London and essentially left the music scene
at that time was I just could not handle living in an area which didn’t have of the nature so to
speak um I really needed that I needed adventure and I needed to be in nature so yeah that’s what
I did um love music I love painting that’s my creative outlets I need to do that in order to
keep my my head in check um I feel incredibly lucky that I’m able to go practically anywhere
paint and essentially make a living from it um that’s that’s a rare thing in this day and age
and it’s something I’ve really worked towards I’ve worked very very hard at
uh but it seems that the universe is kind of like shined on me a little bit and I’ve had
an incredibly wonderful and generous customer base um that I’ve really stopped buying so you
know that’s uh I can only look forward to the future and keep going with what’s going on
yeah and keep an eye on the weather by the sounds of it living in Scotland myself I can appreciate
how um challenging that must have been and uh you know I’m no doubt when you come back again
the weather’s going to be all sorts of interesting for you um maybe I’ll try and zip up and meet you
on there on the trail at some point so where can people find you on the internet
the best thing is I’ve got my facebook painting page set up so that’s more Parkinson painting
I’ve also got an Etsy shop where I sell uh sign limited edition prints um of previous kind of
best selling most popular work and it’s got my own tires down the west coast path painting
series on there as well as the ones from Scotland and that is the painting nomad so it’s Etsy the
painting nomad okay well thank you for coming on onto my podcast it’s been an absolute pleasure
and I wish you luck on your travels next year yeah thank you very much for having me on it’s
been a pleasure to meet and to share a bit of my experience thank you
