oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4 cm

This painting is the result of our short holiday in Aberdeenshire, staying in a cottage on the Asloun farm near Alford, a few hundred metres from the ruined round tower of Asloun Castle and the very pretty Mains house next to it. As we left, on a rainy mid May morning, I took a last photo of the landscape out of the living room window, rain-spattered and full of these curling ash branches, still only in bud. The painting took several passes, I did a soft pencil, and then an oil pastel drawing, both a bit stiff, and it took a lot of readjusting to be more open and loose on the canvas, eventually using very long handled brushes.

I drew the branches  with a graphite stick into the wet paint and then with the extended handle brush. The beautiful Elisabeth Cummings book Radiance was a great source of inspiration as to how to paint landscape.

Oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4 cm

My echinaceas again, a promise of late summer, slightly veiled with a greenish misty glow …..

oil on collaged canvas, 91 x 91 cm

Almost hidden in the foliage of honeysuckle and clematis under the pergola, by my tall garden gate, the delicate roe buck doesn’t quite look us in the eye. He is a thought-beast, like Ted Hughes’ thought-fox, there to remind us of what we humans take when we make our homes on green fields, and grow our food where once was wild wood.

oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4cm

I started this last summer, got it out again recently and added the little white dog and beefed up the roses. It started as a kind of self portrait via the pots, which live on the french door steps outside my studio, and are some of those I have left from being a potter from 2003 to 2016. Then that hot July afternoon light took over. I follow Bonnard in hiding the little dog – my daughter’s terrier – in the shadows. It will be in Graystone gallery’s Festival show this summer, in Edinburgh.

oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm

the bird is a wren and it’s singing, perched on the trellis, upper left. Bims has snuck in too, bottom right. My veg corner, with the fennel and the courgette flowering, and apples on the apple tree.

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.