Paul Chappell’s Story

My first set of paints were called ‘Guitar’ and were cheap opaque watercolours. I loved the greens which were vibrant, and there were many colours in the box!

Living on the outskirts of London in Harrow in our school years, our mum used to take my brother and I for rides out to the country at weekends and we discovered the grand union canal, and Chiltern woods and the river Chess.

I liked doing sketches, any scene, especially with the skeletons of trees in winter along the canal, or allotments nearby. I then worked up paintings in my bedroom at home. Our dad used to bring home calendars of contemporary british landscape artists- of whom S.R Badmin and Roland Hilder earned their living as illustrators, they were my first influences!

Art school in Harrow changed everything of course for which I will always be grateful. But I suppose the need to make a career of it pushed me towards illustration and commercial art, for which I have been lucky to earn a living as a freelancer to the present day.

I don’t think I have lost that urge to draw people in their surroundings and sketch from real life as in my early teens, and now instead of answering a brief, I set my own brief!