Colin was born November 1st 1942 in Manchester, England. He studied art at Heald Place Secondary Modern school in the mid 1950s with Keith Pepper and at the Regional College of Art Manchester in 1959, and also painting with Geoffrey Key in Platt Fields park in the early sixties.

He lived in Rusholme until 1975 and is now living and painting in Burnage, and painting and exhibiting at 82 Portland Street Manchester.

In the late forties and fifties my mother and I would regularly visit the local Rusholme cinemas. This was the time I began collecting books and comics on the cinema of the forties and fifties. Continually looking at films and stills influenced the work from the mid seventies.

For the seventies series, figures came from magazines and papers, then from 1978 we took photographs of Julia Hague, Jackie Williams, Ayshea Hayes, Zinnia Mitchell, Gwen Alvey, Christine Clarkson, Sheila Pye, Jan Donovan and myself for what is now becoming a long running romantic landscape figure based series.

In some filmed momentary shots the background landscape can appear abstract, some films mix a real landscape with a landscape in the studio called a Green Set, all very theatrical, they created a wonderfully romanticised make believe world with the same cast of characters and usually photographed in the same locations. For this new series Paul Starr photographed me in my usual location, Stenner Wood in Didsbury.