An Interview With Simon

In preparation for his new coffee table book - "Simon Bull - A Celebration Of Life", due for publication in May 2001, the artist was interviewed extensively. Simon has graciously given permission to include this interview here. 

This interview represents the most comprehensive collection of Simon's thoughts on painting, life, family and creativity so far published. We hope you enjoy it, and gain a little more insight into the life of this gifted man.

When I'm painting, I'm not too sure if I concentrate on how I feel, because it's like a dialogue between me and the painting. I put a mark down, say a piece of red, and then I think, well it needs a bit of green here or it needs a big flat area of gray over to the right. I'm always thinking about how the painting looks and I'm dialoguing with it, so I can go through a whole range of emotions on a surface level when I'm painting, but I think, for me, the process of painting connects to something which is a lot deeper than the surface feelings, although probably circumstances at the time do find their way into my work, some times more than others.

With regard to getting into a special sort of zone for painting, I like the idea of having my own studio which is just my own private space, where I can just listen to my music and just phase out and paint. I think I probably work better in those circumstances. In fact at the moment we're having the studio remodeled and new offices built so I can actually do this, because at the moment it feels like I actually work in a corridor. I do have a lovely big studio, but in order to access their offices, people have to come through the studio, and the kettle is in my personal area, so everyone comes and invades my space to make a cup of tea! However, in a way, and I'm not sure whether this is usual or unusual for artists, but I can be surrounded by the whole buzz of business, phones going, people coming in and out with deliveries, people talking, people doing stuff, but I'm just standing in the middle of it painting. I suppose it's a bit like Andy Warhol in his factory - he'd be there doing his work and there would be like a hundred people running around. I've never particularly needed solitude in order to work and, in a way, I think I get a lot of energy from the people around me, I'll be working on two or three canvases and, if I'm excited about something, I'll turn round and say, "hey guys, check this out, what do you think?" and they'll say, "great" and I'll think, fantastic, and I'll just put a bit more into it, or they'll say, "hmmm, don't like that, don't know about that" and I think "give me a break" and I'll sort of stand back and think about it and go back on the offensive.

This leads onto the point about what time of day do I paint. Now, depending on the rhythms of my life, if I've got a lot going on in the day and I really have to get some paintings finished for a show and I feel really strongly about what I need to get out and I need to concentrate, I go into the studio first thing in the morning. I'll get up about 4am and work through until about 7 or 8am and then I'll take a break and maybe do some office work, then get back to painting after lunch. But I'd say on the average day I mosey into the office around about 8.30am and go through stuff with Christine/Barbara in the office and as soon as I feel that I've covered the basic kind of administrative stuff in the office, I move downstairs to the studio and start working, I'll work intermittently, depending on what I'm doing. If I'm doing some etching, I'll work in conjunction with Daniel, who's my technician, so I'll work on the plates, and when they're ready I hand them over to him, and then I'll go back up to the office and do some more work. Usually when I'm painting, I like to start first thing in the morning or after lunch. I like to give myself plenty of time, so after lunch I'll start painting and I'll really get into it.

Well, it depends. A painting is, like I said, a dialogue, so if I've come to the end of a series of paintings and I'm happy with them, then yeah, I suppose I feel great, but usually, you know, when you leave a painting and go through to dinner, it's still speaking to you. That is one of the things I find a little bit tricky, because the painting is constantly calling you back, I can sometimes find it a little bit difficult to switch off from what's going on in my head and the dialogue that I'm having with the painting and other stuff. So, once I really start to engage in the painting, I tend to stay pretty close to it until it's finished, and when I finish a painting or a project - by that I mean a series of monoprints or a program of etchings or whatever - then I feel great. You've come to the end of a chapter and you can review it and you've achieved what you wanted and it's great, then you can move on, but while I'm in the middle of a program or if I'm approaching a new series of work, then it tends to be pretty much all absorbing.

Really, it's a very interesting question, because, does one work as a means of paying the bills? My philosophy is, that all work is service, and although we all work "for a living", the reason why we're able to make a living out of the majority of the things that people do, is because other people need those things. For example, we have a need for teachers to teach our children, we have a need for doctors, nurses, TV engineers, or road repairers, anything you can think of, and if anybody is willing or able to do that job, they're actually providing a service to humankind and, in their small way, making the world a better place. There is a financial incentive and reward for doing those jobs because you get paid, which enables you to buy food and live. I know it's a very simple way of looking at things, but with my painting, it's very easy to get caught up in the commercial aspect of it, in that a painting is a product which can be sold and which generates income for yourself and very many people. Ultimately, though, you have to be asking yourself the very true, the very real, the very deep questions that, although I get paid for a painting through the sale of it, what is the service I'm really offering? A schoolteacher is actually training my children, but what does an artist do, what am I doing, and the question that we're looking at here is what does painting do for you? Well, I suppose painting does a lot for me, but it's really what it does for others that excites me and interests me. What happens to me as a result of painting is in some ways a by-product and the way that I can answer this question is probably taking in a number of other answers, so bear with me.

I remember teaching myself how to paint in watercolors when I was at college. My first watercolors were not particularly brilliant, although looking back on them, they're actually not so bad, but I remember going out onto the moorlands outside Leeds where I was at college and painting some scenes of the hills and moors and looking at them and feeling very satisfied thinking that this was great, that for the first time I felt that I was saying what I wanted to say in the way that I wanted to say it, it was an incredible feeling, a very empowering feeling, having struggled with the materials and finally dominating them to such an extent that I was able to let the river flow.

So, in answer to your question of what does painting do for me, it gives me a buzz, obviously, the whole thing of being a communicator is that you get a buzz out of what you do, but primarily, because I suppose the direction of my art is always out towards people, ultimately I get my buzz out of the reaction that the work has with people. For example, when I first started developing my new way of working, I did have some very supportive people around me at that time, and still do in actual fact. People that were excited about what I was doing and believed in it and also believed in me. That gave me tremendous confidence to push through, break new barriers and change the way I was working even more. I think that when I see people responding to the work, then that's what it's all about as far as I'm concerned. I often say, when I speak to art students "don't forget (and it's not politically correct to say this) but if you're an artist, you're in the entertainment industry." Not that you're here to entertain as some kind of shallow thing, but the purpose of art as far as I'm concerned, is to make the world a better place.

Through developing inner life - this is one of the main purposes for the arts. The role of a doctor is to heal people, but we need the arts to be here because they make the passage through this world a more pleasant experience. The purpose is to enrich people in their daily living and to create paintings that will enhance and develop thought processes and reflection, which will help people to understand more of their experience of being human. To widen people's understanding, to open their eyes, to enrich and spiritually nourish people, to delight and to fill the heart and mind with a sense of wonder, to take something common but perhaps otherwise unnoticed, bring it to the fore and create a sense of delight in the viewer as their eyes are opened to see a tree in a new light, or to see a flower in a new way, to look at people in a new way, or to hear music differently, to widen people's understanding of themselves and the world in which they live, to deepen people's responses to other people. This is the job of the artist - this is my role and this is my life's calling. What I like about it is that the real heart of the process is non verbal, a person is confronted with a painting or a series of images and the painting is received through light waves hitting their retina.

It's a sensuous thing, received by the senses and it's abstract in the sense that it's subjective in its interpretation, so you could paint a beautiful red flower, just as God would make a beautiful red flower, and to a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, an atheist, a communist, their eye receives the red from that flower. This is a universal language; it's not tied down to any philosophy or theology. This is the common experience of mankind and this is my language, I like to think that although I personally am a Christian, the language that I use, because it's a language that God has entwined into Nature, is universal, it speaks to most of us. Everybody, whatever their cultural background, responds to love, responds to warmth, responds to nourishment, and that's the language that I use in my art.

This sounds like a very simple question but the answer is quite interesting because it's a theological answer in a way since it depends on how you see the world and, for me, as a believer - as a Christian - it's like this, I believe that God has a plan for my life, therefore the most important thing that I can do with my life is to discover God's plan for it and throw myself into that. I believe that God opens doors for me to live according to his way and closes doors for me as well if he wants me to do something else. I said to God that although I was at art college at that time studying to be an artist and although it was my passion to be an artist, I basically said, "look - let's make this clear, what is most important to me is to do what You want, if You want me to do some other job other than be an artist, then that's fine, no problem. If you want me to be a builder or a shop assistant, anything like that, that's fine, whatever you want, but for now you've got me into this art thing and we'll see where it leads". That was a very important time for me in my life because I did not want to worship art and make a god out of it. I suppose what I wanted to do with my life was to offer it to God, knowing that His path which He would chose for me would be the best. So that if, for example, He wanted me to be an artist, then He would actually make that possible, so, if he closed the door and I wasn't able to paint then He must want to open up something else. You might think that if I couldn't paint now, then that would be the end of the world, that it would be really terrible, but it would not necessarily be so. I don't want to make it sound as though painting doesn't mean that much to me and I could drop it tomorrow - that's not the case at all, it's just that the more I go on in life the more I realize that God has put me on this earth to express something from Him through the medium of painting, and I know that's one of the reasons why I'm here. Okay, I may have some tragic accident and life may take on a different direction, perhaps I'd be paralyzed from the neck down and would only be able to paint with a brush between my teeth - but who knows - I trust God that He will open the way for whatever lies ahead. The real point is that, for now, I paint and I feel empowered to do so.

The answer to these two questions follows on from the last statement I was making about the river. Is painting like breathing to me? - Well, yes and no, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but basically I can paint and I can draw. I mastered the skills - that doesn't present a problem. The problem is - what am I painting about? What am I saying through the painting? I suppose that's where the breathing thing comes in, because breathing is something that you do automatically, 24 hours a day - whether you think about it or not - unless you happen to be jogging or something and you realize how out of breath you are, but there's no way painting can be like breathing in some ways - painting is like holding a conversation, it's like meditation - it can be a very physical thing too - with my larger paintings it's like climbing into them. I would say that for me, painting is - to use the river analogy again - it's like the river outpouring. It's like the brush held in my hand becomes an extension of something within and is a pouring out, it's like I become a vessel, like a jug of some sort pouring something out onto the canvas and the more I do it, the more I find inside to pour out.

In answer to the next question, of I am why so prolific, I suppose a sense of urgency is why. A few years back, it was like there were so many images bouncing around in my head I felt, oh my goodness, I just have to get these images out - I just have to do it - and the more I unpack them the more I find down there. It's very strange but it's a very beautiful thing to have , I suppose, that 'reservoir', and let it flow.

Well, that's another interesting one. You see, color wasn't the first thing about art that started turning me on and I know we talked about the color in my work, but there's something that I've not often shared with people - and I suppose a book would be a great way of doing it - but there's something that's actually more important to me than color and something that I arrived at much earlier - in my mid teens - and that was tone, or I should say, light and dark. To me, these are the fundamentals. Black and white, the interplay of light and shade, light, dark, the polarity between the light and the dark - those two concepts, as a philosophy in themselves, are very powerful and they under gird all my work. Because of light, color is possible, but without the light first there can be no color. When I started out in my teens as a very keen photographer, I had my own darkroom at school and I did a lot of black and white photography, all my own processing and I also worked a lot with pen and ink and with pencil, and that built in my subconscious an ability to see and to break things down into the simplest forms - one side black and one side white. So, if I was color blind, it would be terrible, but there would still be tonalities, there would still be the whole chiaroscuro of shadow and the whole brightness of light and there would be the whole world standing out against the darkness - fantastic.

Color interprets the light. The light is so bright that you can't see it, but color breaks the light down and makes it understandable as through color we see light and through light we see God. Those are concepts that we could take another chapter to discuss but what happens is that color plays a melody on the retina which is very pleasant and, when I first moved into the house where we live now, it was decorated in very bland colors - the dining room would all be painted brown, everything in the bathroom would be blue - the walls would be blue, the carpet blue - and everything was done in this house in a way that was very unpleasant really and I felt at that time that what the house needed were some slabs of red - so I started transforming the house with red paintings and everyone felt better.

I'm going to talk more now about the question of why I am so prolific, what about my pace of working? I was saying earlier that there were reasons for being so prolific, in a sense that I feel there are a lot of images in me that I would like to get out but, talking about the speed of painting as opposed to output raises a number of other issues that are quite important. It's about a rhythm of living I think, and the way that I work is quite physical, the paintbrush becomes an extension of my body, it's like a dance. Every brushmark is very much connected to the soul through the body so that there's a sense of rhythm, a sense of flowing, and that, by very nature, is quite spontaneous and quite direct. One of my lecturers, when I was back at Leeds Poly, used to say, "don't work from the wrist, think of working from the elbow, or the shoulder or even from the waist". He was a great fan of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, and he was actually quite inspirational to me back then. That idea of working from the waist lives very much in my art today in that the marks give a kind of history, if you like, to my bodily movements during the creation of the piece and so I would like to think that, rather than working from the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder or the waist, it's a full body thing, even when I'm working with detailed work. There's a sense that your whole body is involved.

On the question of what I give to my audience, I think I've covered most of that topic. I'm giving them a window, a launch pad to step beyond the everyday; I'm giving them triggers to release keys to their imagination, to help them develop inner life. I'm talking about the world of the imagination, the world where the mind can be richly expanded.

You should really ask "the people" that one, but…… going back to the question of what I am really giving, I would also say that one of the reasons why I think I have been successful, apart from the long years of training - (I was at art college for four years and then really trained myself for many years and was at school learning through a disciplined regime for three years before that). Despite the years of apprenticeship, I would say now that I was able to communicate my feelings through my work and I feel that I am honest in my painting. What I feel and what I think is all out there on the canvas, and although that makes me vulnerable in some ways, I think that anybody who is really creative is really wanting to give of themselves. When I used to teach at Leeds University one day a week, I found that one of the biggest problems art students have is being honest about their feelings in their work. They thought that they had to do work to please the teachers, or get marks and they felt that what they wanted to do was not really important, or would not be respected, or they would be rejected if they put out on the canvas what they wanted to do.

I think we always run the risk of rejection, there's no doubt about it, that critics or people won't like you, or your work won't be accepted or it won't sell. These are all anxieties that obviously play in the background, but you have to rise above that and you have to bring something from the inside and put it on the surface and unless you can do that you haven't really started.

The feedback that I've received from people is that if you have work which is happy or whimsical or lighthearted, you are giving permission to people to feel that way. Because I'm able to get in touch with my own feelings and express myself through the work, people seem to be able to connect with their own feelings as a result. There's a sense in which you're saying to people, "it's okay" and that's one thing that people tell me they get from my work, it makes them feel happy, better, gives them hope, inspires them, brings light to their world.

Living, getting through this day. When I was first married, Joanna and I used to have a saying and we still have it to this day - "there's always another opportunity for faith." And I think that the whole process of being a person is by its very nature, nerve wracking, I mean anything could happen. "Stocks can go up as well as down". You don't know what the future holds, or indeed what the rest of the day holds but I must say that I very rarely feel that anything in my life is nerve wracking and there's one very simple reason for that. There can be many nerve wracking things going on in my life, every day, when you run a business and you've got a family, but do I allow these things to stress me? Sometimes I do, but I found through my relationship with God, as a Christian, I have found peace. A friend of mine recently wrote me in their Christmas letter that, "if you want to know the peace of God, you first need to come to know the God of peace". I have honestly found in my experience that believing in God gives me a great sense of peace and confidence because I feel that he has a plan for my life and that if I trust him and follow him he will lead me on that path. The Bible says stuff like "you have made straight paths for our feet" and "you will hear a voice in your ear saying that this is the way, walk on it". I have experimented with these concepts over many years and found that they work, and I draw on them whenever I have a new experience which is beyond the familiar - which is most days! It's an interesting question, what am I doing right now that is beyond the familiar? As I sit here dictating this I am looking at a great big stack of empty canvases waiting to be painted. I've got to pick up a canvas and make something, create something on it that is new - bring something out of the void - so the whole process of creating in itself is stepping beyond the familiar and I've learnt to live with it over the years and developed a confidence with it. I don't enjoy being stupid, foolish or reckless, but I do enjoy the challenge of moving into new areas, new territory and so on.

No, I don't, because I don't see it like that, and if you start focusing on that sort of thing, it can seize you up and you can't communicate. It's a joy to share my vision - it's not like a duty or a responsibility that I have to do this. I don't have to trawl deep to find the resources to do this. This is like a fountain or a spring, which is forever bubbling up, which I just have to let out and direct and then it takes on a life of its own.

I've just completed a few paintings of the ocean - three paintings of the Big Sur coastline and one from Greece. The Big Sur images grew out of one day that I spent painting with Thomas Kinkade down at Rocky Point - we had a wonderful time, the weather was very calm, very dull, and it felt like the ocean was breathing. The swell rose and fell against the rocks, there were no waves breaking, there was just this rhythmic rise and fall of the water. When I came back to the studio, I started quite a large painting looking out across the ocean based on drawings made that day and, as I painted, the idea came to me that this was just like where life meets eternity. When we come to the edge of the land and the land meets the ocean - an interface - the land stops, everything familiar and secure that we understand and everything that we know comes to a place where it meets the unfamiliar, it meets the ocean, which stretches, limitless, eternal, and kind of beckons to us, maybe the light that glints on the horizon is a sense of what we're called out to understand, or explore, or travel beyond the horizon to see. I suppose it's like a spiritual thing, a challenge, life is so much like that - there's always something beyond that we're called to go into the unknown to explore fresh territories, make new friends, understand new things or there comes a point where life meets death, and is there anything beyond that? - is there anything beyond that? Is that the end when you come to the end of the land? Is that it - do we just drop off the planet? Or do we find something even more glorious as we push out across the water? So, those were some of the ideas in my mind when I painted "Big Sur", and a few weeks after that I just recently finished a painting called "Welcoming Shores", which is based on a drawing that I did when I was in Greece. Actually, Howard Behrens, Thomas Kinkade and myself worked on our paintings and drawings at this location at the same time when we were in Greece last summer, and I brought my sketch back and I worked on this piece and as I was painting it, it seemed like almost the opposite of "Big Sur" which was about the uncertainties of life as we come to a vast experience, and this was a painting of a harbor with a path leading up into the mountains and cottages, and I painted it in very ethereal colors, ocean blue, yellow ochre and orange and it seemed to me that it was about having crossed the water, having stepped out, you come onto a new land and you moor the boat in the harbor and you make your way up the steps into something fresh, into a new experience and - in a way - it's about heaven - you arrive on the other shore and you put your feet on the stairs and move into the wonderful things that await you. Those are some of the thoughts that have been in my mind recently, primarily because of some of the circumstances that are surrounding me at the moment which are making me think about our mortality, but they're not the only thoughts that I've been having. I've been doing a series of abstracts recently that are about moving towards the light, going through darkness towards the light and moving through new doors. I suppose the ideas that are with me at the moment are about eternity, the vastness of eternity, glimpses of something beyond, the sense that all that we are and all that we know is going to be outshone by what is to come, and that life is overwhelmingly optimistic because it doesn't end with this life - it goes on. The light beyond this life is something to look forward to. This life has it's ups and downs, it's full of difficulties and it's full of beauty and wonder and love and great people, but all that there is good about this life is going to be even better in the next life.

This is a twofold answer. One is purely on a business standpoint. As you can imagine, unless your fairy godmother comes along and gives you a salary to live off, the whole process of surviving financially as an artist, especially in the early days, is extremely fraught and I found various solutions to that over the years, but none better than believing that God wanted me to be an artist and therefore that he would provide for me. What happens is that I read the Bible and I get ideas from the Bible about how to live my life - it's pretty straightforward really. There's a book in the Old Testament called Nehemiah about this guy who comes back from his job working for the King in Babylon and he hears that the wall of Jerusalem has been broken down and is in ruins so he asked the King if he could have leave of absence to rebuild the wall. The king grants permission and so he takes a team of people with him to rebuild the wall. The task of rebuilding is difficult because there is a lot of opposition from surrounding tribes and it's actually very discouraging, it's very hard work, very intensive and they seem to take one step forward and then two steps back, but he makes this declaration in the second chapter, verse 20, and he says:

"The God of Heaven Himself will prosper us,
Therefore we, His servants, will arise and build."

I would say that this simple scripture has been pivotal in motivating me to continue developing the business side of my career and as a means of supporting me on the creative side because I fundamentally believed that God Himself would prosper me, God Himself would open the way, and because I believed that, I was therefore confident to "arise and build", to get off my backside and paint those pictures knowing that it would come to something. When you're a younger artist, you're never in a situation where somebody some day comes along and says, "hey you're a great artist, you're going to have a wonderful career, everything's going to be fine, everything will be wonderful, just you paint all your pictures and it'll all turn out great". It never happens, you make your own future and your whole life is spent charting through unknown territory. You never have many role models to go by, whether in art or business, you're doing something which is effectively new, as far as you're concerned at least, and you just have to trust and I feel that scriptures such as this have given me the confidence to go ahead, even when financially things have been very difficult, and you wonder sometimes how you're going to carry on, raising a family, developing the business and staying creative and doing new work all at the same time.

I would say that my work has drawn me close to God in the sense that my relationship with God has had to work. It would not have been possible for me to do what I have done. If my belief in God was just like a set of formulae or a philosophy that didn't actually work, I mean it's had to work. I've had to say to God, "well, there is no more money this week, we've got the mortgage going out next week and I've got no sales on the horizon, you said you were going to bless me, so what are you going to do about it?" I have found, time and time again, that something shows up. Believing in God has to make a difference to everyday life or what is the point of faith? It's not just a case of making ends meet. I have gained in confidence over the years, knowing that this was what God wanted me to do gave me an increasing sense of confidence that what I'm doing is going to make a difference to people's lives.

I like to think that I'm led and not driven. You know, you're talking about a leading, a voice calling you out to discover and express, a whisper here, a beckoning there, to a sense of adventure. I feel I want to make something very beautiful, I want to create a very powerful emotional experience for people. When people see my work, I want them to be affected. I like the big experience; I like the crescendo at the end of the movie when everyone gets the Kleenex out. There are moments like that when everything comes together and I love to talk about big life experiences.

That's not a question that I can answer, other than by saying that it's a question that can only be answered by individuals. The beauty of painting, drawing, or any visual art, is that you create something and then another person sees it and they bring their experience, their values to that piece and they relate to it completely independently from you, and so it means one thing to one person and it means another thing to another person. No picture has an exact interpretation: that must be perceived by the individual. You create the opportunity for an individual to relate to your work in a way that is not dissimilar to relate to it at the time you are creating it.

I'm sure there is, if you look at some of my earlier work. I had my first show when I was 18 years old in Hong Kong, and there are paintings from that show in which you can see the roots of what I'm doing now, and I find that very interesting. When you look back and see that there are themes and ideas that have always interested me, even though I've not been aware of it at the time, I think you can see a development. Obviously when you look at the whole narrative from the very beginning you can see the scale, the technique. I think more than anything else in the last few years you see how a disciplined approach in the early years finally led to an explosion that is what we have now.

I've written about early teachers in the story about my drawing teacher at school, Colonel Starkey, but the earliest teacher that I had and that I can remember, and certainly a very influential one, was at Cromwell School in Germany in 1964. I forget her name but she stands out for three reasons:- one is that I still have the school photo with the teacher's arm on my shoulder as 'teacher's pet', the other one is because she sadly had a nervous breakdown during one of our lessons, she finally cracked and I always remember that as a very strange experience for a six or seven year old child. We were in the classroom and she was just sitting there, staring into space and we were all moving around the classroom and going into the store cupboard and getting out of control. She was very artistic and I remember her showing me how to make sculptures out of plasticine, I made a zebra that I was very proud of and I remember it to this day. She also showed us how you could take a piece of paper, make a square on it, and draw lines in a crisscross pattern across the paper and then color in all the different shapes in different colors, and she called it a 'pattern'. I used to absolutely love doing those patterns and, when I look back, that was such a powerful early experience because that's what I do now in my work today, I just work within the 4 corners of a canvas or a piece of paper and I compose and create shapes, balancing one against the other.

When it came to the High School Art Prize, I never won it because it was decided it wouldn't be fair to give me the art prize because it wouldn't have been fair to the other pupils and so they always gave it to the best improver!

I got a lot of encouragement from my parents, in fact, this Christmas just gone I went down to my father's old church in Barkham, just outside Reading, where he used to be the vicar in the 70s, and I met one of the old guys there who used to know my dad and he said' "do you know, Simon, I always remember your dad saying to me when I asked him about you and what job you wanted to do, he would say I don't know if Simon's going to be an artist, but if he ever has a proper job then he'll never be an artist" and I have to say that my father was very supportive of me being an artist and making a living out of it and although he wasn't in business as such, being a clergyman, he always had a very strong organization and business streak in his personality. He always kept a few chickens or pigs on the side and made a few extra bucks. I think one of the things I learned from my father in this respect is that I saw the independence of a self employed lifestyle. An artist has to make his own life and decide his own schedule and the clergyman in the same way has got Sunday morning service and regular meetings, but beyond that he has to make his own schedule and has to make a difference with his daily living and my life has turned out almost the same as his in some ways in that I make my own schedule and I seek to make a difference. I'm looking for an improvement in the world, in the lives of the people that I meet and can be touched with my work, to leave them better than I found them, so, maybe I'm a clergyman after all!

Also on the question of what did early teachers tell you about your work, one of the former students of my college is a guy called Norman Ackroyd who became Norman Ackroyd RA (Royal Academy) and he is quite a well known etcher in this country and he was quite famous when I was at college - he was one of the 'stars' and he used to come back and do teaching every now and again and he came up to my studio when I was in my final year at college and he was looking at my work and I was telling him how I wanted to go professional when I left college and he said "forget it." Strangely enough, I think that was a really positive statement, it helped me a lot because I thought - "give me a break, I don't need you to tell me whether I'm going to be a professional artist or not", so it was very good - it was like negative encouragement. I was provoked to make even more of an effort to make sure that it did happen, but I understand too that he gave me very sound advice, I mean to anybody who wants to be an artist and do it as a living, you might as well forget it. Why subject yourself to that amount of stress, why not go and work for a bank, at a supermarket, make a living from day one - why kill yourself? But there are some of us who are so obsessed that we are prepared to kill ourselves for 20 years before finally breaking out.

No, but when I'm awake I do see things in my mind's eye and then come back to the studio and paint them. I've got a piece in front of me here in the studio called "Foundation". I was driving my kids back from the Youth Club and in my mind's eye I saw this amazing image which is like a grid of red squares on the left and green on the right and I thought - wouldn't that be a beautiful piece - and I just sat there in the car looking at it in my mind's eye and then I came in and painted it and when I finished, I realized that it was like a digital code for all my work and I learnt through looking at that piece to see in my own work that there is a light side and a dark side to most of my paintings and there's a day and a night in every piece that I do. This painting is very simple but I call it Foundation because it shows a lot of the ideas underlying my work in a very clear way.

Generally though, no, I don't dream stuff and then go and paint it. My dreams tend to be pretty similar to everybody else's i.e. a jumble of what happened last week or whatever, but my waking thoughts are much clearer and I definitely see things in my head and get a perception of something that I'd like to do and then I paint it. I see it, then I start putting the marks down and I dialogue with the marks, and what you have is a compromise between what I first saw and what has been spoken to me by the painting.

There are lots of little anecdotes I suppose on this one. I've already described the time when I remember making abstract drawings in class and the zebra out of plasticine when I was in primary school but also, back in 1964, when I was six, I remember my brother and I used to go down every Saturday morning to the matinee performance of the ABC Cinema in York. The matinee club was called the ABC Minors and it cost us sixpence to get in. We used to go down on the bus and queue up with all the other little kids outside to see John Wayne and all the old black and white cowboy movies. They also used to run games and competitions and, one time, they had a coloring competition which I entered. One week my brother and I decided to sit up in the balcony, it was the first time we'd actually sat up there and it was during this particular session that they announced the winners of the coloring competition. To my amazement I was announced as one of the winners and I went into a panic because I was in the balcony and I didn't know how to get down to the stage but I managed to run out the back and down the stairs where the stewards directed me to the front. I climbed up onto the stage which was one of those old fashioned cinema stages - real fifties/sixties style - and I remember standing in a round spotlight receiving a prize of a slingball kit which was a spoon-shaped plastic tennis racket and ball and that was my prize. As soon as the show was over that day, I remember getting on the bus with my brother and playing slingball back in the garden at home. So obviously that was encouragement - that was a good laugh!

The final section is not based on questions that have been asked but I thought it would be a useful section to add. "Tell us how you met your wife, etc." This is the story, Joanna and I met at school - we both went to the same boarding school - which is the Royal Russell School in Croydon, South London. Joanna went from the age of seven to eighteen, and I went from the age of eleven to eighteen. The school was in purpose-built buildings which were very elegant, designed by a famous architect in the 1920s. The grounds were landscaped with woodland and so on, 130 acres, which is an incredible situation in London - a paradise in the middle of the city. The school had an outdoor swimming pool next to the cricket field and in the summer it was quite a popular place to hang out. Back in 1973, when I was fifteen and Jo was sixteen, we first got to know each other. The summer of '73 was a really hot summer. Joanna was in my brother's year and I never thought of her as girlfriend material as she was older than me, but we got to know each other well and became good mates and had a lot of laughs together. The following term, at the Halloween Dance (every Saturday night we used to have a school dance - but every now and again there would be a special one and the Halloween Dance was one of the special ones.) I was actually trying to catch the eye of another girl at the time and she was playing hard to get. I asked her to dance and she suddenly realized she wanted to go to the bathroom at that particular time, which was very convenient because at that moment Joanna came up to me and said why don't we have this dance together, so we did and that was 27 years ago and we've been together ever since! At the school the guys lived in boys' houses and the girls lived in girls' houses and you walked your date back to their house and we had our first kiss - which was very romantic - so we were inseparable from then on and used to spend all our spare time walking in the woods and hanging around together and it was great. Four years later, in 1977, we got married and that was after my first year at Art School and after Joanna's first year at Bradford School of Physiotherapy. We moved into a flat on the top two floors of an old terraced house in Bradford. Bradford is a northern industrial town in England that grew up over the last couple of hundred years as a wool center. My mother was born in Bradford and in fact that's where David Hockney comes from, so it has some interesting artistic connections. In fact, my next-door neighbor in the flat we first lived in used to be at school with David Hockney and it's an interesting place, but we lived there for fourteen years in three different houses. Our first apartment consisted of the top two floors, with our lounge-cum-studio above and the floor below it had the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. We used to have a coin-operated electricity meter where you had to put in coins to get electricity but we had some great times there and I've got quite a few drawings still from those days when I would draw Joanna in the flat and I did a lot of still life paintings there. The lighting in that apartment was extremely good and I always remember it because it was my first real studio - it was a typical 'artist's garret' because it was an attic room, but it was very romantic - the good old early days!

After four years there, we moved to a place called Waverley Terrace, which was the first house that we bought - it cost us £9,750 in fact - and it was a little terraced house that we absolutely loved. It had a little garden out the back, which I landscaped, and once again the top floor - the attic - I converted into my studio. This was where I installed my first little etching press and it was there that I started getting into etching after I left college. It was while we were in Waverley Terrace that we had our first child in September 1983 - Christopher Phillip - and so we became parents, which was a pretty awesome experience. He was soon to be followed by Rebecca and then Katherine. At the same time as Rebecca was born we moved house again to Pasture Lane, Bradford, which was a much bigger house and there, we converted the entire basement area into a studio which gave me a big working area for the printing and a separate room for my main office/studio and also a separate room for processing the plates and so on. Whilst we were living there Katherine was born and ten years later, after moving up to the Lake District, we had Annabel Chloe in November 1997.

Well, when I first started working in this more colorful way in the mid-90s, I thought about ways of titling my work that would increase the overall impact of the piece and actually add something to it. I was looking for titles that would pull the person further into the picture and enable them to develop their own story and their own ideas about the piece. An example of one of the early monoprints that I did was a bowl of flowers with some red tulips and green leaves, it was very loosely painted, and I called it "Look To Your Dreams". So, although perhaps a few years previously I would have called it something like "Tulips In A Gold Vase I" or something really boring like that, I now was able to widen the interpretation of the piece by giving it a title that inspired hope, and that pointed the viewer in the direction of looking to their dreams, so the idea was that the piece was about red tulips on one level, but on another level it was a painting about optimism and hope and the possibilities of all that could lie ahead in the future. The idea is to inspire people to look to their dreams and reach out and hold onto their dreams, to keep on believing, despite the difficulties and challenges that arise to stop those dreams coming to pass. The phrase came from the song by The Carpenters, and in fact a lot of my titles come from music - from pop music or things that I hear on the radio or ideas I pull out from my head. I remember calling one piece "Together", and there's a piece called "'Made For Each Other" - many of my titles are deliberately romantic, because I also want to make my work a kind of focus to bring people together. For example, when a guy goes into an art gallery and sees this piece called "Made For Each Other", he's drawn to it first, because it's red poppies and he thinks it's beautiful, and then he thinks of his girlfriend or wife and thinks: "what a great opportunity to share this feeling". So he brings the painting home and says "darling, we're made for each other" and it cements them and gives an opportunity to express something about their relationship. In this way, the art becomes a way of bringing people together and encouraging people in building romance and pleasure and the feel good factor into life. So you want to inspire hope through your work and bring people together through your work. You want to use the titles to uplift and to point the mind of the viewer along the right lines, along the lines of relationships, of romance, of getting a good thing going.

Obviously there are other aspects. Sometimes I'll call a piece 'Serenade' or 'Blue' or 'Red' or I'll just call it a very simple title. In fact I've just called a new series of etchings that I've just produced: "Blue", "Red", "Yellow" and "Green", because sometimes a title can just be very lightweight and the minimalism of it can speak to you as well.

For years I would work directly from life, painting watercolors of animals, the landscape, interiors etc and I would travel to the Mediterranean, the Himalayas. Wherever I went I would take my paints, do a lot of plein air painting and enjoy interacting with the landscape. During this time, the paintings that I did of architecture, such as windows, Georgian houses in London and the windows and doorways of Mediterranean houses in Spain and Majorca, led me to become interested in working inside homes and looking out through the windows.

A friend of mine called Pauline lived in a huge Victorian mansion in the Lake District, she was an interior designer who used color in the interior space to create what I can only describe as a sensation, and I worked in her house for about a year painting the scenes out of her windows, but then increasingly I actually painted interior scenes of her house. For example, let me describe how the house looked. The big family room, where the kitchen and dining room was, had bottle green walls, and the armchairs and sofas etc were all bright red with multicolored scatter cushions. She had a large dining table covered with a mustard yellow tablecloth with a great turquoise enamel plate in the middle with some oranges on it and black chairs around the table. One of the rooms was painted bright gloss red with a dark blue ceiling, and a black marble fireplace stood out against the red, and there were big oil paintings in thick gold frames. After working at Pauline's for a while, I began to be intrigued by the way the color in the house was actually affecting me. To be honest, whenever you entered the house and walked into a room, it gave you a kind of tingling sensation. There was something very uplifting, something cleansing and very healing about it - the way the colors worked together kind of created a space that was a pleasure to be in, and I began thinking about this with regard to my painting. I thought through the concept of making color itself the subject of the art, and so I embarked on a series of monoprints that focused on making color the subject. As a result, the subject, whether it was a vase of flowers or a landscape or an abstract, became pushed into the background and the color itself became the subject. When doing this I found that I was able to actually communicate an emotion and a feeling in a much more powerful way than just by painting a landscape as I saw it with my eyes. I began to paint by seeing things with my heart and I started to go beneath the surface. Painting a picture from then on ceased to be about making it look like what I was looking at, but creating a painting that stood up in it's own right, regardless of whether it resembled the original subject or not. I began to free myself from the constraints of representational work, and focused instead on making the colors and marks within the four edges of the canvas come alive, and work together to create something that would make people feel good, cleansed, invigorated, inspired and uplifted.

I feel every one of us born into this world carries some special gift. It doesn't have to be one thing, it can be many things, but we've all got a contribution to the family of man. For me, it happens to be art and I can speak to the world through the medium of painting, as can many other artists, and I'm just one of many thousands of artists in this generation, linked with all the generations gone by. Something ties us all together - who knows what and who knows why - but I believe that I have a responsibility to bequeath to the world the images that I carry inside me, to give birth to them. Rembrandt or Van Gogh or any other of the great artists of the past, in their time, they were maybe just making a living but they actually bequeathed something to the world that generations later we get a great deal of pleasure from. Now, it could be that when I die, nobody ever hears anything of me again and my work just dissipates into people's private collections and is destroyed and never seen again, or it could be in museums, or considered interesting, or great art - I don't know - but the point is that on any given day I can actually paint a picture and I've made something which will probably outlive me. I've said something but if I just walked out on the street or did office work or went shopping, whilst it may have value in itself and that's great, it's a painting that I would have missed and an opportunity to put down something that only I can do. There's a lot of people that can paint, but there's only one Simon Bull, just like there were a lot of people that could paint but only one Van Gogh. There's people that have imitated his style and I'm not trying to make out that I'm somebody extraordinary or anything, it's just that I have my own particular way of looking at the world which is completely unique. For example, people have asked me this in the past, when I first started doing my colorful etchings, people would ask me if I was concerned that people would copy my work and take it to the market and do really well with it and steal my market and I told them I felt very unthreatened because people can copy my style and I'd be delighted to tell people about how I do my work and they can copy my style by all means, but nobody can get inside my head, nobody can ever be me and as long as I'm true to myself I don't need to worry about anyone else doing my sort of thing. In fact, I'd love people to do more of my sort of thing because - well, why shouldn't they? Norman Webster, who taught me etching at Leeds Poly, always used to say "anybody can be taught to draw but you cannot teach anybody to be an artist" and I would say that's absolutely right. The process of learning to draw is a technical ability that you can learn but that kind of primitive urge to express yourself through drawing and to want to speak in that language is something that comes about through a combination of nature and nurture - it's something that you're born with but also your circumstances develop in you and - who knows why it is - but why else would anybody commit to the bizarre sort of lifestyle that an artist lives and, although I'm successful now, and in fact although I've always been a professional artist, to be honest a lot of my friends were living a lot more comfortably and a lot more financially secure lifestyles many years before I was and I often tell people to think twice about trying to become an artist. To become a doctor you need 6 or 7 years in school before you graduate but, if you want to be an artist think even harder because you've probably got 20 years of poverty lying ahead of you!

This has turned into quite a long explanation about how God has been good to me etc. We all bring a gift into this world - we all have an opportunity to leave this world a better place or a worse place than we found it and, for me, as a Christian, I believe that God can give me the ability to do that, to leave this world a better place, to make the journey of life more bearable for more people and I believe that that will be something that is in a way the mission of Christ. God sent His Son to bless us. The promise in the Bible that God made to Abraham was "I will bless you and make you a blessing" and in this sense, what I mean by the Lord Jesus Christ will be glorified is that, in other words by becoming involved in the same kind of work that he was involved with, that is reaching out to people with the love of God and expressing through my work the love of God which calls people out into a relationship with him and calls people to a place of peace and eternal rest, as that happens through my work, then Christ is glorified and, if you want to have that for a non denominational audience you could say God is glorified or that the purposes of God are being worked out through my art as people feel the love of God coming through.

I'd like to describe the view that I get looking out of my studio window. The studio is actually an old sandstone barn built about 230 years ago, which was recently lovingly restored, retaining all it's original features. The big arched doorway where the old horses and carts would have come through has now been turned into a large window overlooking the garden, which I've had landscaped over the last few years. We've got flowerbeds that come right up to the studio and different paved and pebbled areas in the garden, a pond, a row of fir trees and beyond that the church which you can just see from the studio here, the church is many hundreds of years old. Today, it's the middle of winter, and everything is gripped in a very hard frost, all is silent and frozen. Above us just a few crows make their way across the sky. The studio and the house are built around a courtyard complex, and the garden is surrounded by the house, so as I look out of the window across to the house, at the moment I can see five of my white fantailed doves resting on the roof. I brought the doves into the garden a few years ago because I've always loved birds, but apart from that I like to create the drama of coming into the driveway and having an explosion of white doves as you enter. They also create a peaceful aura to the whole scene. It's important to me to have the studio overlooking the garden because I use the garden as one of my main subjects, so in the spring, fall or summer I just wander out with my sketchpad, take notes and draw. There's always something growing in the garden that will provide subject matter or some inspiration.

The studio is quite large and has a number of different aspects; one of the other windows which adjoins the area where I do all my monoprints overlooks the garden in the same way, but has a view beyond the garden wall over to the hills. From that studio you can see the snow-capped Cross Fell at the moment, which is the highest mountain in the Northern Pennines and the hill that dominates the Penrith skyline, I've painted it on a number of occasions. From the other side you look out over the Lake District mountains and, once again, we have the snow-capped Blencathra, otherwise known as Saddleback because of it's distinctive shape. From the office window we overlook the lane coming into the village, it winds away beneath us through the fields to Penrith and the hill that rises just above Penrith called Penrith Beacon, which is a pine tree clad hill with the houses of Penrith nestled into its flank.

A little something now of the little village of Newton Reigny and the environment that I live in and how it inspires me. One of the reasons why I've chosen to live out in the countryside instead of in the city is that I appreciate a contemplative environment in which to work. The work itself is pretty busy, obviously it's not just painting pictures, it's also running a business, so it's a very peopled and very demanding schedule in many ways, but when everybody goes home there's just the quietness of the fields with sheep, rabbits, horses and space to walk and breathe, think and pray and just come back to a place of peace.

In answer to the question about whether the age of Newton Reigny makes a difference to me, I think the answer is "yes". The ancient history of the area where we live definitely influences me, not so much in the way that I paint about it, but when you walk around the Lake District or around this area, you're so far from the urbanized and modernized world that it does give a sense of perspective to your thinking, and kind of grounds your work in something which is more than the fashion conscious trends of the modern world.