Born an identical twin, Michael Joseph has always been spatially aware. From an early age he was competent at drawing and using his hands to make things from all sorts of materials. At school in the 1960’s, he was runner-up in a national car design competition with Vauxhall. His entry was a hatchback before they had been invented. He became an engineering apprentice at Rolls-Royce Aero Engines in Derby where his original and creative thinking led to him winning a competition, the prize for which was a Private Pilots Licence. Learning to fly was a skill he found easy to master with his ability to judge the three- dimensional concepts of speed, height and vectors.

 

In 1971 he joined British Airways as a trainee airline pilot at Hamble. It was as a distraction from the intensive training that he first took up oil painting. This soon led to exhibitions in London with the Guild of Aviation Artists, where he won several awards including the Aviation Painting of the Year Award in 1987. He was elected a Full Member and was the Chairman for two years. His paintings were bought by British Aerospace, Fokker, the RAF Museum at Hendon, British Caledonian Airways and Air Lingus. He also took pleasure in painting and exhibiting locally in Sussex where he could broaden his subjects and artistic ideas.

 

Today he enjoys the creative process by switching between drawing, painting and sculpture, responding and editing from one work to the next. In 2017 he held a successful one man show at the Oxmarket Gallery in Chichester and later in the year won the Stride Open Drawing Award.

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