Peter Hay (1951-2003) was a visionary artist. He was a very English painter whose work has a poetic and mystical quality. Eclectic, curious magpie, he found inspiration from everywhere and gathered it into his image-making. He was a fine draughtsman and watercolourist, a brilliantly inventive printmaker. At heart a figurative artist, the work moves into abstraction through striking black and white and a rich use of colour. After studying Fine Art at Reading University, and two years away in Cornwall, Peter Hay settled in Reading for the rest of his life. He had a strong sense of place; the junction of the rivers Thames and Kennet close to his home was a frequent symbolic theme in his work. He became a central figure in the local art community and was an inspirational teacher. In 1994 he founded Two Rivers Press which gave him the opportunity to pursue through illustration his passion for campaigning, his love of poetry and history. This book brings together the range of this prolific artist's work for the first time.

This second volume of John Froy's memoir, a sequel to his childhood story in 70 Waterloo Road, takes us from Italy to Reading University and Falmouth School of Art with many twists and turns between. The memoir chronicles the life of an art student in the 70s: a time of great experiment and change; the figurative/abstract divide in painting and sculpture; the new photography, film and Happenings. And in the gaps, while extricating himself from the family home, being a volunteer archaeologist in Assisi, an osprey warden in Scotland, a London bedsit and dead-end job, a Wiltshire valley idyll and landscape painting in a caravan through a Cornish winter. 'Things may come and things may go, but the art school dance goes on for ever.' (Pete Brown, 1970)

Written as a poet's view of the world's oceans and islands from a small boat, these are poems concerned with human vulnerability and ecological anxiety. John Froy's second collection is filled with love, hopes and fears for his family and friends and for the natural world, from Costa Rica to Japan, Somerset to Cumbria, to Antarctica and the oceans. There is loss, both personal and global - the death of a father, a stepfather - and environmental loss, the damage and havoc we continue to inflict on our planet, habitats and species despite all warning, and the urgent need to protect them. But there is also joy, humour, gratitude, admiration and love. Simple, direct and unconfrontational, yet the sense of catastrophe looms.