Alex Harwood

I was born 50 years ago in Charing Cross Road hospital and lived in Charing Cross Road for the first 3 years of my life. In my cot I would have heard the music from Denmark Street (Tin Pan Alley as it was then called) as we lived on the corner.
My parents along with my elder brother and me moved to the suburbs to Pinner Village in Middlesex. My father was a strict authoritarian figure he owned and run a printing business on Harrow on the Hill. He was a keen painter in his spare time and was quite Bohemian and untidy with Victorian attitudes on how to bring up children. My mum 25 years his junior was a housewife, in the early years very much dominated by my father but then growing in strength and rebellion until the balance was changed and their relationship became one of fierce conflict. I can’t remember when I first started painting but I suppose the support and encouragement along the way meant that I continued. I nearly always received praise from my dad when I showed him something I had produced and I certainly received the time and attention from him that I otherwise wouldn’t have received.


When I was 17 my parents had a very acrimonious divorce and my life became anchorless. I tried a variety of different jobs and lived in various places in London until I moved into my mothers’ spare room in her flat in Richmond. I attended first Harrow College of Art and then Richmond College, and on completion of this last course started trekking the streets of London with a smile and my portfolio. I received work almost instantly although I remember for my 2nd assignment not getting paid because the company went bankrupt. However I had found that I could get work doing illustration and was energised and determined to make a go of it. After 2 years I was able to put a deposit on my small flat in Wimbledon.

I’ve had two main relationships along the way, my first with a musician that I met when working at the BBC he was on TOTPs playing keyboards and had a fair degree of success as a musician especially in the 80s. He was a positive constructive influence on my life and our rather hermitic relationship lasted 20 years. Nature being a more powerful force than intellect necessitated my leaving the comfort of his pretty little cottage with its walled garden for the world beyond. My commercial work up to this point echoed my interests at this time in that I was mainly working in watercolours producing illustrations for packaging and advertising agencies, the content mostly food, wildlife and flowers. I met my 2nd partner who worked for a while with the Circus of Horrors, I spent time touring with him between work living on Clapham Common and under Battersea Bridge in a caravan. I would always have my camera and my sketch book. Some of my paintings are based on this time and some later when he set up an entertainment agency hiring stilt walkers, magician’s’ fire eaters and the like. He also put on shows at Glastonbury and various other festivals so this was also another source of inspiration for me. I left him with our then 3year old son, when he formed a liaison with a stilt walker and lived in Spain for 2months and then 1 month in Wales before returning to my flat in Wimbledon.

Our beautiful son is now nearly 11 years I am still living in Wimbledon and still painting.

Amongst my early artistic influences were Turner, Waterhouse, Monet, Gauguin, and William Morris and Fredrick Gore. I read alot, I used to make my way through the Penguin Classics my favourites being Balzac and Zola. Nowadays Ben Elton and Irvin Welsh.

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