My father used to run a choir.
I used to stand by the doorway and listen to these people singing in the front room,
reading the sheet music, which I thought was magical.
But it stuck with me, the sound of a human voice, choral music.
I absolutely love it.
My footprints came to this country and they brought us over.
Many of the days are quite grey.
I was 11 years old when I came to this country.
This is 1957.
There weren't that many black people in Oxford.
My name is Paul Dash and I'm a painter.
I'm a figurative painter and I make work in a variety of media.
Oil paint, pen and ink, watercolour and collage, in fact.
It started when I was a schoolboy.
My mum and I used to go each Saturday morning to the main market in Cornmarket, Oxford City.
I would nip upstairs to the top deck of the bus and look down and the people milling around the streets.
I was fascinated by the way people swirled around and the tourists and the students,
their long scarves and people with their bicycles and so on.
I didn't take a sketchbook. I didn't know what a sketchbook was really.
So I just memorised everything and made these paintings.
I developed the technique of representing the figures using spots of paint.
Each day I walked to school and at lunchtime I came home for dinner and I walked back again.
I didn't really play. I was too nervous and twitchy.
I didn't go anywhere to clubs so I didn't even go to the swimming pool.
I think my mum was worried about drowning and things like that.
Things were much more dictatorial. You were told what you were going to do and that was it.
You did it or you got a hiding.
I mean there's racism in Barbados to this day really.
But when I came here you were right in the teeth of it.
The working class kids in that school, it was meant that we should go to the factory.
That's why we were not educated.
We had to try and find our own feet there in that space.
You sank or you swam and you know that was it.
And then there's this issue of being black in Britain, being Caribbean,
and trying to locate myself to make contact with something.
I felt, I don't know, I felt grounded in some way.
I found it very very difficult to do that in Britain.
I started painting at home.
But I didn't want to paint scenes of Oxford.
At home I painted what I really wanted to paint and that was pictures of Barbados.
I think I lost myself in that.
That was my way of grounding myself.
It's like saying or recognising that I was Caribbean, had a Caribbean cultural experience
and it was something valuable and the best way of maintaining it was to make loose paintings.
That's what I did.
That's what I did.
