Secretary of the Cleveland Art Society - one of the oldest art groups in the country; part of the management of GTS1 art and crafts shop, Middlesbrough, and member of 24NE Collective - Sunderland’s contemporary art gallery; Alan is published in various books and magazines. He has exhibited in galleries in London, the Cotswolds, Lake District, Yorkshire, Co Durham, Newcastle, Northumberland and Glasgow - showing with the British Society of Painters/International Guild of Artists; Christie-Wild international in Miami, Florida; Newcastle-Gateshead Art Fair; Fylingdales Group of Artists; Mall Galleries as ‘Artists and Illustrators Magazine Runner-up Artist of the Year’, and at MIMA. As one of North East England’s most active artists with merchandise reaching across the world, his paintings are in private collections throughout the UK and in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, mainland China, Canada, France and Italy.

He co-founded the Figurative Brotherhood with a London artist and was part of the broad New Image/New Wave Painting movement of the 1980s - the visual energy moment in British art history which arguably instigated Brit Art.

Becoming a funding contributor to Middlesbrough Football Club and Swan Hunter Shipbuilding on the Tees in the mid-1980s, he then began teaching art in the 1990s and broadening his skill as a painter across several disciplines. He is the inventor of Big Parochial - an art approach which re-evaluates principles of recognised art styles for a contemporary context.