Acrylic, cold wax and oil paint on canvas, 2024, 120 x 100 x 4 cm
I was inspired to have another go at painting my garden by Hayley Barker – and Andrew Cranston, Bonnard and Paul Klee (ref Paul Klee for watering cans and trellis) and Matisse – my garden made over four years with cardboard sheet mulching over tired lawn, and prairie flowers grown from seed
oil over acrylic on a beautiful cradled panel I won from the company Artists’ Surfaces, in the collaboration they do on Instagram with Artist Support Pledge. It is 40 x 30 cm and 3 cm deep. I tried to be too careful with it on the first go round, but for this final version I mostly used a palette knife and quite thick oil paint.
It’s the same distant figure reading on a deckchair in the park in Paris. The photo made the wall of the Orangerie grounds look like a lake, so I went with that.
oil, pigment, acrylic and collage on a box canvas, 2024, 80 x 70 x 3.8 cm. How to listen to your painting and stop at the right moment. Quite a lot of words visible on this one, torn up pages from a poetry pamphlet I’ve just produced as a kind of artist’s book.
a figure I found in an old photo I took in the Jardin des Tuillerie in 2017, hidden away in the trees.
oil on acrylic on cradled gesso panel, 2024, 7 x 5 ” with a tiny deer-suited figure sitting in the bandstand. The bandstand in the park (La Florida) in Vitoria-Gasteiz, that beautiful capital of the Basque country. Is she/are they singing tonight?
Inspired by another poetry writing workshop – on a starry starry night – thinking about Midnight – little oil painting on board, 2024, 20 x 20 cm, – Things Which Are Not – “For I am every dead thing/In whom Love wrought new alchemy – the day’s deep midnight ” – a bit of John Donne.
oil on cradled panel, 2024, 7 x 5 inches (18 x 13 cm)
this is a park with a bandstand in the Basque capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz. It’s a beautiful city with much greenery, and this is the view from my hotel when I stayed there in autumn 2015. More or less. I love painting on this scale, the extra looseness it gives to the brushmarks is very satisfying.
oil painting on gessoed cradled board, 2024, 8 x 6 x .8 inches, or 20 x 15 x 2 cm,
this guy has long sweptback ears, he is part of a series to do with a poem of mine – based on the story of Oisín, the Irish hero who is born as a deer when his mother is turned into one by a dark druid. The deer-boy and deer-people are populating some of these, and they inhabit a place inspired by photos I took nine years ago in France on a friend’s property and in northern Spain, in the city of Vitoria_Gasteiz, which is the capital of the Basque country.
Oil on cradled gesso board, 2024, 19 x 16 cm.
I started using oil paint again early this year and tried it quite runny and gloopy on this one, not quite under control. The same two figures and the little white dog are in the large painting Footnotes in the Singing Wood, done just after completing this.
acrylic and oils on collaged canvas, 2024, 100 x 120 x 4 cm
