During these years his interest in cars and motorcycles filled his spare time restoring a Riley and a Sunbeam. The move from moving images in television to painting came about when the BBC were looking to reduce staff, and seeing an opportunity to change his lifestyle, Roy took redundancy from the Corporation, bought a cottage in Devon with his wife Sandy, and decided to take a belated ‘gap year’ in order to hone his techniques and skills with the paintbrush. Having spent many years riding and tinkering with bikes, it was only now that the idea of painting pictures of motorcycles occurred to him, following a friends request to make a commission painting of a Harley.

Roy’s style is difficult to label for what on first inspection appears to be finely observed and rendered fine detail, on closer inspection has a impressionistic approach in his ability to create the illusion of technical precision by using small brush strokes and blocks of colour to represent mechanical details. Roy’s very individual approach to the subject is heavily influenced by the advertising images used by the Motorcycle manufacturers in their brochure and posters of the 1950’s and 1960’s. His colours are often selected to bring a feeling of nostalgia, for the good times of past. Roys motorcycle work is usually produced using watercolour paints, a particularly difficult medium used on a difficult subject, there is nothing like making life tough for yourself.

Over the last 20 years Roy’s nostalgic and atmospheric paintings of classic motorcycles have created a huge amount of interest from bike enthusiasts worldwide. And his earlier limited edition prints are becoming highly sought after.