About

The Doodle Diaspora

My portfolio of drawings and paintings, no longer content to be confined to folders and boxes, have decided to explode forth in pursuit of the oxygen of exposure.  My family and friends also carry some blame in that they assisted by prising open the lids and unleashed my crazy visual ramblings.

I have always loved drawing and painting and my mother encouraged me from an early age.  Just the smell of paint now takes me back to that imaginative world where a blank sheet of paper was an exciting adventure land.

I grew up in Africa in a world of bright light and exotic noisy creatures.  My parents nurtured me on Greek myths and the likes of Rudyard Kipling in sufficient quantity to leave the imagination and sense of the whimsical intact despite a traditional schooling of the sixties by strict mean men who beat us with any available implement progressing from rulers through clothes brushes to cricket bats.   Now in our current era we forgive them, now that we know that they were all probably suffering post-traumatic stress after the Second World War!

My first adult artistic or artisanal endeavours took place when I moved to Ireland with the Muller family in 1977.  We settled in Sneem, County Kerry and I took up wood carving making lamps and candlesticks.  I did not paint then but must have learned a lot by watching Anne Muller painting who doggedly turned out masterpieces despite the sawdust and noise.  After seven years in the Kerry wilderness I sadly went the way of Irish youth and moved to England to pursue a career in the City of London.  The Muller family continues to thrive at their Brushwood Gallery near Sneem.  On a recent visit I was amused to find out a pair of lamps I had made had returned to Brushwood after a thirty year sojourn after being acquired in an Antique Shop!!  I was flattered they had soared in value but it was a stark reminder of passing life to have one's work in an Antique Shop!

I am unashamedly untutored in painting and still learning.   I find comfort in telling myself that the first caveman painter did not have someone leaning over them telling them their ochre was too wet and lecturing them about golden means.  Thirty thousand years later their work is still admired.

I love painting in watercolour but the medium is a constant challenge and the learning curve is like a tortuous bicycle ride through the Pyrenees, long arduous ascents followed by exhilarating descents which leave you facing yet another grim ascent…

Thus seeking shelter under the great maxim "The Best is the Enemy of the Good" – I am launching a range of cards now rather than later, giving procrastination no more time to polish, perfect, dither, spoil and hide – Long live spontaneity!!

I am currently writing and illustrating a children’s story inspired by my granddaughter Lottie’s toy bunny.   Snuggles, left home alone, decides to make good use of the time and goes to visit his cousin in the west of Ireland and ends up with some inevitable adventures and a quest to Skellig Michael meeting elves, fairies and other creatures on the way.   Several of the greeting cards on this site are illustrations from the forthcoming book.

My wife Rosemary and I lived a kind of migratory lifestyle between Somerset, England and the west of Ireland where we have a cottage near Sneem overlooking the Atlantic.   Here we found time to get over our last adventure. We ran a china shop called The China Box in Winchester during the nineties and ended up embarking on a crazy crusade when we started a campaign to save Burgess & Leigh of Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent, makers of the Burleigh brand of earthenware, when the company went into receivership in 1999.   None of the heritage bodies including The National Trust, English Heritage or Prince Charles could help at that most critical time so we ended up having to buy the business and two acres of Victorian factory ourselves, the alternative was that the pottery would have been asset stripped and sold off.   Our home in Winchester was left like a modern day Mary Celeste with unfinished breakfast on the table and we up and left to run a factory employing fifty people for ten exciting years.

William Dorling