I was born in North Wales at the end of 1943. My father, who was an excellent draughtsman, taught me drawing and painting from a very early age. This was in an academic style and I knew nothing about art until I went to an Art School in London in the early sixties.

There my tutor was dedicated to the American Abstract Expressionists and I was expected to produce similar work without the least understanding of how or why. I became very confused and disillusioned. Fortunately, visiting various galleries, I soon became aware that the new fashionable painters of my generation were doing Pop Art and this encouraged drawing and traditional skills.

I did a great many paintings in this style until, soon after leaving Art School, I became interested in film making. I have always been fascinated by the moving image and I have been a film director for almost thirty years, as well as being a painter. However, I am now committed entirely to my painting and the one subject I want to continue to try and capture and describe is the human figure in motion.

Sometimes I use the early sequence photographs of Eadweard Muybridge as source material but I also use still frames from videos I have taken myself of naked models and dancers performing in my studio. From these I do a great many drawings and I will overlay two, more often three, positions before selecting only those lines and shapes that interest me and best describe the movement. I do not re-invent my figures, everything is already there. Often in this reduction process I find so many of the lines, from one position to another, join up together and make a rhythm that makes it seem like I am almost drawing music.

The essential parts of the final painting are the 'empty' spaces. These are the areas and lines deliberately left out so that the viewer has to make the connections and use his or her imagination to create the illusion of movement.

Michael Milburn Foster (Michael@MilburnFoster.com)