My head

The sculptor of the head was my best man and best friend - sadly now no longer with us - James Wingate. This is the only thing, apart from some photographs of him, that I still have to remember him by.

Jim did the head about 50 years ago. Though trained as a painter, his real love was sculpting but he did not have the opportunity to do much of it. The head is clay and while it was drying in the garage of a flat we then shared, it was vandalised and had the original ears knocked off. So the ears you see were modelled on his own ears - not his subject's. But the subject now is old and bearded and growing thin on top so does not look like this bust very much at all.