M. J. Westley

M J Westley’s lifelong artistic endeavour has been primarily with the visual arts: drawing and painting. After leaving college, he travelled through Morocco before returning to work in repertory theatre until 1975, when he undertook a postgrad course at Cardiff College of Art. Through the 80’s and 90’s, he worked in a variety of jobs that included theatre, advertising, driving, gardening and teaching. He also rode his motorcycle across most of Western Europe and Ireland. Exhibitions of his drawings were held in cities throughout the UK. In 1992, he won the Guinness Prize at the Royal Academy, leading to increased exhibitions of his work in London. 

Since 1996 (the year his son was born) the corpus of his work has been landscape paintings. Based in the West Midlands, he travels throughout the country on his motorbike, covering thousands of miles, collecting material for future works. He has also written poems and stories, as well as a strange biographical work entitled Prospographical Strains. Thimblestar took seven years to write, between all the paintings, drawings and travel. 

On the creation of Thimblestar, he says: “The whole thing hinges on its relationship with my grandfather. In the novel, it is he who is given the story and he alone able to decipher its enigmatic ‘codes’. Although Grandfather writes the story, it was related to him by an elemental. English is not the language of faeries, but over thousands of years these creatures have assimilated it well enough. As the story progresses, it is well to bear in mind this provenance, which although it doesn’t explain any of the strange language does provide a reason why it is the way it is.”