'I'm a recluse artist who has barely left my house for a decade but I paint using my photographic memory'

For more than ten years now, Mike has been a recluse, barely stepping foot outside of his front door. Producing artwork has become somewhat of an addiction, a way to explore the wider world without leaving the confines and comfort of the flat he calls home.

“I enjoy starting with blank pieces of paper or card with an idea in my head,” Mike says. “Then putting a few marks down and seeing it develop almost by itself. It’s like a mind, eye, hand connection…Then, (at the end) you’ve got this thing you couldn’t even imagine you could paint. It’s like Christmas opening a present when you don’t know what’s inside.”

An expressive mark maker, Mike works from memory, inspired by the places he visited and the experiences he had when his world was a much broader place. He works also from the panoramic view of Harrogate he can see out of his window as well as taking inspiration from the building’s interior and from books and television shows with which he can relate.

“I’ll be watching something on TV and something will flash up that reminds me of (a memory, place or experience) and that sparks something off,” he says. “I rarely watch something from beginning to end because I get distracted and turn to the sketchbooks at the side of me.”

There’s a pile of them of various sizes in his living room, next to an empty beans tin that now holds a selection of biros. Mike also works in charcoal, pastel and paint, having turned one of his bedrooms into a home studio. He experiments with texture by using combinations of oil paint, gloss, blackboard paint and emulsion and using wads of newspaper, in favour of brushes, to layer it on.

His hand can produce up to 100 biro drawings every single week. Space now limits him to just one oil painting in that time - as canvas artwork (not just his own) is “closing in”. His house too is like a cabinet of curiosities, with African carvings, tribal art, antiques and pottery. From those too, Mike draws inspiration.

His art is predominantly abstract. “There’s an element of figurative work, though you wouldn’t know to look at it,” he muses. “There’s mental pictures I’ve got, situations I’ve been in, that I can draw on…Unless I’ve actually experienced a place, I can’t paint it because I can’t feel it. It’s not in my bones.”

He takes himself back in his mind to the streets he once wandered on, the things he used to do, and the buildings and objects he once studied. “I’ve got a good photographic memory so I can still do paintings and drawings from when I was in Filey, at the age of five or so, and all the other places I’ve been to, or experiences I can remember,” Mike says.

He was born in Grimsby to parents who had both served in the army in the Second World War, but spent a large part of his early years in Filey with his grandmother. When Mike was six, the family then moved to Boston in Lincolnshire to accommodate a promotion for his father, who by this point was working in the country’s civil service.

Another move - this time to North London - followed in Mike’s teens and though he’d always been “dabbling and scribbling” as a child, it was at a further education college in the capital when a teacher really encouraged his artistic talents and he signed up for A-level art.

“I spent my free weekends, holidays and any time I could going to London and going around museums and galleries,” Mike remembers. “The more I went to, the more I wanted to paint.”

After a brief spell at teacher training college (he had considered becoming an art tutor), Mike secured a place at St Albans School of Art, where he met painter Arnold Van Praag, a practising artist tutor.

“He liked my work straight away and he took me under his wing. He lent me books, showed me even more books in the library, and wasn’t telling me to do anything as such but offered words like ‘have you ever thought about doing it this way?’”

From there, Mike went to art college in Liverpool, a city where he also managed to take part in a couple of exhibitions. He never completed his degree course though, spending too much time in the city and not enough at college itself.

“I used to spend a lot of time going out and about Liverpool, doing sketches and drawings, in pubs, down by the old docks,” he says. “It was two years of painting in complete freedom, doing what I wanted and that was really eye-opening.”

After that, Mike drifted from job to job, caring only that he had enough money to continue painting. He later spent 40 years with the civil service, but was still always creating whenever he could outside of work.

For some years afterwards, he became a carer for both of his parents. Then, after they died, “I had a bit of a meltdown and ended up with agoraphobia,” Mike explains.

The condition is defined by the NHS as a fear of being in situations where escape might be difficult or where help wouldn’t be available if things go wrong. People will typically avoid situations that cause them to feel stressed or anxious, and for Mike that has meant he has struggled to leave the house for just over ten years.

Online shopping is his norm, whilst his neighbour posts letters for him - and Mike just about manages to head out to the bins in his building’s car park. Still, he says, he’s “quite content”. Working with a hypnotherapist initially helped Mike to venture slightly further but falling in frost on the way to the bins nearly five years ago knocked his confidence.

“I had a few sessions with a mental health team, which were very good, and in the end I decided instead of classifying myself as agoraphobic, to rename myself as a recluse,” he says. “That takes the pressure off having a mental health condition and I felt that rather than it controlling my life, it was my decision to become a recluse, and I felt in charge of myself again. Since then I’ve been much more relaxed at home.”

As for the art? “It’s an addiction,” he says. “It’s like smoking or drinking or drugs… I just can’t stop.”