Norman Gilbert, 89, artist from Glasgow

PEOPLE often think art is about becoming rich and famous. If I wanted to become rich and famous then I have gone about it the wrong way. That isn't what it is all about for me.

I'm 89 and my new exhibition at the Sutton Gallery in Edinburgh will cover 65 years of work. It was quite a job choosing what to include. There are some gaps, but it goes from the 1950s right up until this year.

I was born in Trinidad to Scottish parents. My father was a chief sugar engineer and factory manager. I crossed the Atlantic five times before I was nine. That was the 1930s. Everyone sailed back then. No-one flew. My father went on to India and then Burma. My mother is buried in the Scots kirk in Rangoon.

When I was 17, I joined the Navy and served from 1944-48. I was on the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet HMS Liverpool. It was mostly showing the flag and parading. I was a radar plotter. We went everywhere from Casablanca and Sevastopol to Port Said, Gibraltar and Alexandria.

I got an ex-service grant which allowed me to study at Glasgow School of Art in 1948. It was there that I met my wife Pat, who became an art teacher, and we have four sons. It took 15 years from leaving art school until I had my first exhibition. In the early 1950s, we lived in a caravan near Newton Mearns where I tended 200 pigs to help pay the bills while I painted.

I was hawking my paintings around the London galleries and getting nowhere. Then suddenly I had a two-page feature in Vogue in 1967. Everything changed. I went down to London to find 30 of my pictures in the Upper Grosvenor Galleries just off Park Lane.

It was an exciting time with Carnaby Street and everything going on then. I remember carting 4ft-long paintings around on the Underground. I had a second exhibition and was all set to have a third when I discovered the gallery had closed. I was unemployed and had to start at the beginning again.

I have a strong determination. What kept me going? Well, this is what I don't know. Anyone with some sense would have given up long ago.

I didn't choose this style of art, it chose me. It has got me into a great deal of trouble over the years. I've had people walk out of galleries saying: "These are the worst pictures I've ever seen" because they just don't get it. Others have said: "I wish I had done what you have."

Decorative has become a dirty word in art. I use a great deal of pattern and all my drawings are purely linear. I don't use shading or tone. That can be terribly demanding because you need to enclose the whole form or shape within a couple of lines. The paintings are all flat colour which is not the Scottish tradition at all.

I never realised how much against the grain I was going. I was described by one art school as "a dangerous influence to have around". That's all water under the bridge now.

There is no sense in having regrets in life because it is simply the way the cookie crumbles. I said from the beginning that art was the only thing that would last me a lifetime. Even when I had no sign of anyone exhibiting my work again, it didn't stop me.

It is always mixed feelings ahead of a new exhibition opening. You are like an athlete that trains for years and then the spotlight is turned on you for five minutes. It is the time in between I like best.

Norman Gilbert's exhibition opens at the Sutton Gallery in Edinburgh today and runs until July 23. Visit normangilbert.com and thesuttongallery.com