About Dan.
Dan is a British Artist who has produced an extensive range of artworks across a variety of media and uses a wide range of tools, methods, styles and techniques - he has been at the forefront of British Bonsai for over 50 years. An undisputed innovator, educator, and master of his craft.
His formative years saw him working primarily with the media of drawing, painting, poetry, and photography, he has dedicated most of his adult life to working with the living art form of bonsai, and latterly (many decades), as a master in the art of ceramic bonsai pots (though he only ever refers to himself as a student of pottery).
Born in Hong Kong in 1938 - the last of thirteen children - he has six brothers and six sisters, four children of his own, and five grandchildren. He has been married to Cecilia since 1962.
Dan first acquired an interest in bonsai in 1969. He has never had any formal training in bonsai and was essentially self taught, but he was fortunate in having been trained and qualified in the first instance, as an art teacher, and, later in graphic design with Applied Photography being his main subject, he was self-taught in this too. He was a Senior Lecturer at the Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England) and finally graduated to Head of the Photographic Department. It is the last 50+ years of involvement with various aspects of the visual arts that have helped him enormously with bonsai and it is essentially this background he relies on when creating his trees. Dan took early retirement from his Lecturing Post with the Polytechnic over 30 years ago and set up an educational Service in Bonsai, involving: demos, workshops, master classes, lectures, residential courses etc.
For over 25 years, Dan served as a judge for Bonsai at the Chelsea Flower Show and numerous other Royal Horticultural Society shows and has received numerous awards for bonsai trees exhibited at the International Bonsai and Suiseki Exhibition, Osaka, Japan, including the major Award in 1989. He has also received many other International awards for bonsai. He was made a Member of the British Bonsai Roll of Honour (by FoBBS) for contributions to the furtherance of Bonsai within Britain and he was honoured in 2006 by the Association of British Bonsai Artists (ABBA) with their "Most Prestigious Award" for his contribution to British Bonsai. He has been a guest bonsai demonstrator at many Bonsai Conventions in the U.K., most of the European countries, and in America on numerous occasions. Dan has conducted over 500 different teaching programmes.
He authored the highly sought after 'The Bonsai Book', published in 1989 by Ebury Press and has written (but not yet published) a second book that deals mostly with aspects of the aesthetics and philosophy of contemporary bonsai practice in the Western World and offering an alternative approach from the traditional methods to the subject.
Dan was Founder of The Bristol Bonsai Society, the Association of British Bonsai Artists (ABBA), and The Classical Bonsai Circle. He has created several national Bonsai events such as "The Joy of Bonsai" and "Bonsai UK Exhibition", (BUKEX), and Bonsai UK Sponsorship (BUKS). He also created two Love of Bonsai charity events to raise funds for M.E. and cancer which raised thousands of pounds. He currently makes handcrafted stoneware pots for bonsai with his wife, Cecilia, with the guarantee that no two pots will be the same.
He finds that sharing his talents, knowledge and experience with others is the most fulfilling and rewarding part of his life. In fact, "Life is so good, there is no time left to die".