Name: Gerard D'Alton Henderson.
Age: 69.
Occupation: Famous artist and muralist based in Hong Kong.
Career path: My father, an Irish intellectual, was editor of the Malay Mail and The Straits Times and my beautiful Chinese mother was an artist. I was born in 1928 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I studied at home and learned the violin from the age of nine. The war years I spent in Singapore at a buddhist monastery learning Chinese and Japanese. At the age of 17, I became First Violinist for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
But I felt I needed to express myself in another way so, on the strength of a few portrait commissions, I set up my own studio. I moved to Spain in 1956 and went to art school. I spent a year working with famous Spanish sculptor Enrique Monjo and then, in 1960, moved to London to work on a number of projects, including the Savoy hotel's Princess Ida Room.
In 1963, I came to Hong Kong to create a series of murals for the Grill Room and main lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel. My most consistent home over the years has been Hong Kong.