He and his wife moved to Bethesda in 1969, a village near Bangor and close to the Penrhyn Quarry. He taught part-time at Liverpool School of Art until 1974, then at a local school, Ysgol Dyffryn Ogwen, and then at Coleg Menai, but he concentrated more on developing as an artist. He specialised in paintings of the Penrhyn slate quarry, which he described as "the biggest man-made hole in Europe, like Bruegel's Tower of Babel, but in reverse", and of Snowdonia. His early works have an Expressionist style, almost Cubist. He painted similar views from skyscrapers in Manhattan on a visit to New York City in 1993.