Introduction
My interest in canals and associated subjects started in the year man first walked on the moon. During the last week of the School Summer Holidays in 1969 my sister and I were invited to join an Aunt, Uncle and their daughter for a weeks holiday on the River Avon. It was years later that I found out that my Aunt hated it as the boat was so small. I really enjoyed the week and took a dozen black & white pictures with an old Kodak camera. One of those pictures won first prize in a church photographic completion. So there we have it, at the age 12 I became interested in photography and waterways! The winning picture, which is shown below, is the lock linking the River Avon and the River Severn.
My Uncle, who had a love of boats, really enjoyed the weeks holiday and two years later he booked a holiday travelling around the 'Stourport Ring' and invited my parents with my sister and I. In those days you could complete the 'Stourport Ring' in a week but that has now become more difficult to achieve as canals have become so popular. The picture below (one of my Dad's) shows our starting point for the holiday. The Tardibigge Boat yard. That holiday led me to joining the Inland Waterways Association and a few years later, an advert in Waterways World provided me with the opportunity to sign up for a weeks course in Canal Art at 'The Hill’, Abergavenny. I became hooked on canals, canal history, canal architecture and canal art.
I began my working life as a college technician in the carpentry section of the Building Department at Hackney College in East London. After a few years I moved on to train as a Secondary School teacher for Woodwork and Technical Drawing, which over many years, and a number of name changes, became Design & Technology. Under that title I taught GCSE Graphic Design and A Level Graphic Products. In the early years, I also taught a bit of computing but it was not until later years I had the idea of building my own website to share my interest in canals and photographer. Full time teaching took up a lot of time and it didn't seem a good idea to have my own website where pupils could track me down out of hours! So it wasn't until I retired, that I set my mind to creating my own website and this is where we are now.
When this website was first set up I looked for a clever domain name and came up with ‘Flick ’n’ Click’. Flick represented my paint brush used for canal art decoration and Click, the shutter button of my camera. It may have been a clever idea at the time but it was not obvious for anyone looking for me, so I have now changed the domain name to ‘Canal Art by Tim’.
All the photographs contained in this website are mine unless otherwise stated.
For more information email me at: [email protected]