British painter, born in Birmingham. He studied at Birmingham College of Art, 1955–9, and at the *Royal College of Art, 1959–62, and with a number of fellow RCA students—Derek *Boshier, David *Hockney, Allen *Jones, R. B. *Kitaj—he emerged as one of the leading exponents of British *Pop art at the *Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961. Early in his career a certain sinister edge was detected which distinguished him from the others. The painter Richard *Smith said that he ‘adds darkness to brightness’. Typically his imagery is drawn from modern American culture—jukeboxes, pinball machines, automobiles, film star pin-ups and so on—painted in the tight, glossy manner of commercial art. However, the images are usually set into bold heraldic frameworks or fragmented into sections and reorganized, so that illusionism, reinforced by the use of spray-paint technique, and abstraction are combined.