Doing this job he polished his engineering skills, but his real interest in life however, was painting. He was a gifted amateur artist and was genetically incapable of driving past the Tate Gallery without going in and viewing a few pictures..He often took teenage  Brian with him to help lift fridges.

          The Tate collection was the basis of Brian’s artistic education, but his father had already, from an early age taught him the technique of renascence painting; how to prepare your canvas, how to build up each layer of paint with increasing amounts of linseed oil so that it would not crack, and the chemistry of the various pigments so that they did not react chemically with each other. This education had been so effective that by the time he was in his teens he earnt his pocket money by painting portraits, of even people like admirals and judges.

          However, by his mid teens Brian had started experimenting with abstract art, much to the chagrin of his father. It was these paintings that he and Bernie had taken to show Victor Musgrave. The exhibition that resulted from this contact, came as a surprise, and out of the blue.

          Brian had never got on with his parents, and he had left home early. He knew of his father’s disapproval of the direction his painting had taken, but he thought he had better invite them to the opening.      They were disorientated. They did not know whether to be proud  or scandalised by the show. Brian walked past a group standing looking at one of his pictures and heard his mother saying, “But it doesn’t even look like a horse.”