Occasionally I wonder whether I chose the wrong path in life. If I’d put the same amount of work into an office job or a trade instead of sculpting I may have been much better off financially, but probably not spiritually.
I was one of five children of immigrant Irish parents and grew up hand-to-mouth, for my mother died when I was 10 and my father had to bring us up on his clerk’s salary. My parents had that immigrant aspiration for us all and insisted we study for the 11-plus. We all got into grammar school where the expectation was that we’d join the professional upper middle class.
I tried accountancy but it nearly killed me with boredom and I dropped out of art college when my father’s house was repossessed. I then got into sign-writing for a supermarket and painted about 60 signs a day for £5.50 an hour which was decent money in the 80s.
One night I saw a programme on TV about the Sir Henry Doulton Sculpture School in Stoke where students were given funding for fees and living costs. I immediately knew that’s where I wanted to go. I continued sign-writing during my studies and was able to get a 100% mortgage on a £12,000 house in Stoke. The girlfriend I’d met at art college followed me there and her salary as a Marks & Spencer window dresser helped fund the £108-a-month repayments.
My luck turned when I was asked to create a brick frieze in Burslem for which I was paid £12,000. It established my career and commissions started trickling in.
It’s a precarious existence. Some years are lean and some hectic, but it’s always hard to save – the profits from the good years go on servicing the debts and repairs from the bad.
Life changed when I was commissioned to sculpt a herd of bronze Jersey cows for the town square in St Helier. The fee was £220,000 for two years’ work and that included the cost of the bronze and other expenses, but what was left over enabled me to self-certify for a massive mortgage and buy a £235,000 smallholding on the Scottish coast in 2002.
My wife and I endured hell and high water and some bailouts from family to keep up the repayments on our £165,000 loan while bringing up three children. We reduced the debt by £65,000 by selling off some outbuildings. We have six years remaining and pay £800 a month – a large chunk of our joint annual income which averages £25,000 to £30,000. Some of this comes from renting out a cottage on Airbnb which earns us between £2,000 and £4,000 a year, the rest from my sculpting commissions.
It’s easier to live frugally in the country – in town, there’s greater temptation to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t drink or smoke, seldom eat out and rarely take foreign holidays. We have our own vegetable garden and chicken run, and I shoot pheasants. Our food bills are about £290 a month.
Our one indulgence is our horses. We have three – my wife’s cob which cost £350 as a foal, my shire horse which was born from a £1,800 horse we owned, and a Shetland pony given to us free. Their care and feed comes to about £2,100 a year. We run two old cars, a tractor and a forklift which cost about £275 a month, insurance policies amount to £180 a month and we spend £315 on fuel and other household bills.
We are now both in our 50s and don’t have a pension so we need to focus on paying off our mortgage, overdraft and credit card debts and start saving. The future frightens me sometimes and that’s when I wonder whether I should have done things differently. You need strong motivation to make a living as an artist, but if I’d stayed with accountancy I wouldn’t have met my wife, had my three children, or lived in this glorious place. There’s a saying up here, “What is meant for you doesn’t pass by you”, and for me that has always been true.
As told to Anna Tims
