acrylic and oil on canvas, 50  x 50 cm.

Daffodil Sky, oil and acrylic on canvas 100 x 100 cm.

oh strawberry oh lemon oh daffodil oh hellebore. I did get very carried away by the colours here, just as the daffodils, dandelions, forsythia and crocuses were at peak yellow.

White crocuses with chinooks, oil and acrylic on cradled panel, 41 x 30 cm.

In early March chinook helicopters were doing war games/practicing/low flying around us for a couple of weeks. With what has been and currently still is going on between the US and Israel and the UK and Iran and the whole of that area, it felt very menacing. Being an old hippy I painted flowers – the crocuses I put under the front grass last autumn had come up and the white ones were  especially beautiful.

One day in February I received 12 tiny hellebore plants in the post and spent the afternoon in my tiny greenhouse potting them up and the evening painting this event in watercolour in my A4 sketch book –

Potting up hellebores in the greenhouse, oil over acrylic on collaged canvas, 60 x 50 cm

The watercolour translated a little later into this painting of the winter garden, the winter gardener and the US bomber which is being allowed to use our airfields to reload these terrible weapons for an illegal and inhumane war. See, I am still against war.

Even if it’s a lie, oil on collaged canvas, 50 x 50 cm.

is it a bird? no it’s a B52 bomber taking off from the UK to go and bomb innocent civilians and commit war crimes, refuelled and refilled on a UK airfield. the person in the greenhouse looks up at the sound of it the daffodils and all the plants in the garden have runny weepy paint.

In January I started painting these moths and writing poems about them.

in watercolour at first, all very soft

The spruce carpet. oil on canvas 30 x 24 cm.

The poems all got erased as although I love writing on other paintings, as in Daisy Paris, and Anselm Kiefer, it wasn’t working for me in oil, even when I cut the poems to one or two short lines.

On paper, hardly legible, I like!  Red swordgrass, watercolour in A4 sketchbook.

M O T H , oil on collaged canvas 80 x 60 cm.

At Christmas I did some figure paintings of Lucy in watercolour, as I had been given a little watercolour kit by them. Then I painted this oil when I got home, on a canvas 61 x 61 cm. Very much in the Christmas spirit. In fact all the fireworks in the background are the Marimekko curtains which are actually forest green and are full of owls and squirrels and such like creatures.

For Hogmanay they went to stay in Florence with an art historian friend on a residency there, who was living in a flat “stuffed with too much furniture” but the furniture was rather decorative; I was sent some photos of the celebrations and very taken with Lucy in this chair, wearing a dress I made her for a birthday present.

from which the watercolour and this little oil on panel, 25 x 20 cm, came.

This is Lucy taking a selfie in the mirror to show me the gold trainers she was borrowing from Marika to wear with the dress I gave her, from my Japanese designer (Mina Perhonen) stash. Again, the furniture takes on a life of its own. And the background is quite abstract in parts, all the layers welling up to happily partner with the dress and the furniture. Oil over acrylic and pigment on collaged canvas, 80 x 70 cm.

Sometimes after getting quite intense over a painting (the shoes – the feet, it took me ages to get the size right) it’s great to let go and do something really loose of the same subject. I only feel that freedom with watercolour, so this is in a sketchbook.