Painting subjects

With his yin-and-yang feathers, the magpie is the living embodiment of that most fundamental of truths…our world is full of light and shade. Just in case you had forgotten this, you will see it represented in the leaves right above his head, in the dark clouds and light in the sky…yet which of these is… read more

“I may be very small and just so ordinary that I seem to blend in with the background but, when I speak, my words are so beautiful that everybody stops to listen”…. This is what the Wren, with her beautifully powerful song, always seems to “say” to me; which is a timely message for our… read more

I’m a bit of a folk head when it comes to music and I recently chanced upon a collaboration of some of my favourite artists called “The Lost Words”. Their intention is to bring to the stage the oh-so important message of a book by the same name; here’s the “about” section from their website: “Once… read more

Over the coming months, I will be sharing some brand new artworks on the theme of English garden birds since I have such an ongoing love aiffair with them. This first one, entitled Sacred Song, was inspired by an experience I had with a robin a few weeks ago when the timely encounter I had… read more

“Transience”. I wanted to capture the fragile, other-wordly beauty of some quite tiny blue flowers that appeared, self-seeded, in the cracks of my patio in the late summer. For over a month, this tiny plant produced 2 to 3 flowers each morning….only for the petals to scatter to the winds by lunchtime, every time. Yet,… read more

Is there such a thing as the perfect storm? This oh-so serene swan brought such a thing to mind. Content and self-focussed as a fiesty “storm” of blossom blew down onto her, for all the world like a heavy blizzard of snow or ice, and yet this storm was so benign that she hardly noticed.… read more

We were on a visit to Kensington Palace when the concept of this artwork came to me. I had been in search of the essence of Diana yet didn’t find her in the palace, with its queues, its security checks and paranoia (we watched a couple of security-related scenes play out as we sipped our… read more

Alliums are a favourite subject of mine; I love their almost architectural form – perfect spheres made up (when you look more closely) of so many intersecting stars; they are like a metaphor for the whole planet and they catch the light so brilliantly. These favourites have already appeared in a number of my paintings,… read more

Visiting Monet’s house and garden at Giverny was a bucket-list experience for me and is up there with a handful of other artist and collectors homes that I have now visited, from Charleston and Kettle’s Yard to, more recently, Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence (highlights will take you to blog posts I have written about all… read more

This painting held itself back for the very end of 2014 and then asserted itself in a way that wasn’t to be argued with. It was a painting of the heart; one that presented (first) as a compromise and (then) as more than an answer to a dilemma I had been having about painting one… read more

Anyone that has read into my background at all, via my Biography or my health blog Living Whole, will know that I have been on a long journey of self-recovery from fibromylagia. The many-layered way that my journey towards better health has interwoven with the art that I produce is undeniable to me and, increasingly,… read more

Have just dropped off new work at The Frame Gallery, including some of the panoramic landscapes that I so love to paint. I find the proportions of these wide, shallow canvases work so well for certain landscape subjects, especially where I am seeking to draw the eye in at virtually ground level and then…on and… read more

As the Spring Exhibition at Gallery Fifty Five draws to a close, and as I sit here looking at the big blowsy peonies in a jug right in front of me, I thought I would just say a few words to celebrate this favourite flower of mine. My contribution to the current exhibition is a… read more

I recently took a step out of the framed, contained paintings that are my norm and ordered myself a canvas of new proportions; something about as big as I could practically transport to a gallery and with sufficient depth to stand alone without framing.  The subject I had in mind: a particular moment captured in… read more

A universal truth that I seem to have tripped upon is that, even when something  appears to strike a posture of separateness or independence from all else, it takes just a small step back to find that it is actually working in harmony with everything around it – there really is no separation. A solitary… read more

A very typical sight across the English countryside in mid to late August is that of hay bales spaced out in fields and across hillsides and it is one that I deeply love, not least for being something that signals to me that I am back home amidst the very familiar after our travels. Before… read more

  I waxed lyrical about Charleston in a much earlier post and my most recent painting is my own tribute to a garden – indeed a place – that had a massive impact on me when I first visited it over 20 years ago and which has retained a special place in my creative psyche ever since.… read more

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my (four) recent paintings was of a Venetian canal hemmed in by all the haphazard geometry of shuttered windows, porticos, balconies and rooftops. I spent a good portion of last weekend scanning this in sections (its reasonably large), sewing it together and uploading it to my website and… read more