STOLEN PAINTINGS
STOLEN PAINTINGS
In 1994 I moved to live in the south west of France. We rented a house in the small village of Puimisson to the north of Beziers in L’Herault. A year later I bought a big almost derelict barn of a 'Maison de Maitre' in Cazouls-Les-Beziers nearby.
In 1997 I came back to England with my partner and our children for a week before Christmas and during the night of the 21st December the house was burgled. the thieves took almost every painting in the house. I remember arriving back at my house and walking into the stripped living room.
They took my best work; the paintings that I had kept for myself, and some of the work I had made as a post graduate student at the Royal Academy school; paintings of the casts, the first proper paintings I had ever made.
because I did not intend to sell these paintings I had not had professional photographs made. I do not have photographs of most of the stolen work, only very poor snapshots of a few of them.
The thieves left me
one painting, at the bottom of this page, PUIMISSON SELF PORTRAIT.
I used to have dreams that I would be on a bus and would see my lost paintings in a gallery window as I passed. Then I would not be able to get the driver to stop the bus.
I still imagine that one day the Internet might help me find the paintings.
That was the first time that the house was broken into. The thieves came back regularly and I left them notes on the kitchen table but after that first burglary I had nothing for them to take.
