Barry Germain

I was born in 1939. all through the 1940s and early 1950s I waited with bated breath for Rock 'n' Roll to be invented. When it hit England like a tornado, all the way from America in 1955 I instantly became a teenage rebel.

In 1954 I went to art school for 18 months, it should have been 2 years, but i got expelled for having too much teenage angst. I then got a job as a poster and signwriter. In late 1957 I got a motorbike and became a ton-up boy. I started going to cafes where other bikers went, as well as Teddy Boys. In 1961 Following a serious crash I found that I couldn't write posters as well, due to the damage to my right hand.

I got a job as a gardener for Lancashire Education Committee. Working with a small team of men looking after the grounds in all the schools in East Manchester. In 1963 I got married and in 1964 I re-discovered my love of art and started painting, selling a lot of my work in Davey and Sons, a gallery on John Dalton Street in Manchester.

In the late sixties, Solomon and Whitehead Guild Prints Ltd, one of the largest fine art publishers in Great Britain, bought the reproduction rights for four of my paintings and put them into print. I felt very honoured at the time to be alongside artists such as David Shepherd, Benjamin Leader RA, S. R. Percy, Herring Senior etc.