oil, acrylic and pencil on collaged canvas, 93 x 93 x 4 cm

Looking at Cy Twombly gave me the confidence to be looser with my prairie flowers and I used a soft pencil as well as oil paint, as he did on his huge bare canvases unlike this which is not huge at all. The rusty dribbles are a glaze medium which has gone toffee coloured, and there was a lot of abstract prep before I brought it indoors to paint the flowers,  the watering cans, my suburban garden surrounded by big bungalow roofs, and the snake is back.

Oil over acrylic on a collaged canvas 100 x 100 x 3.8 cm

Here I am reading a book on the sofa next to four of my painting crushes on the tilted-up table next to me, and my orange note book with the tape measure rolled up on it.

I enjoyed painting the books, upside down. They are the large Bonnard book by Isabelle Cahn, a newish book on Vanessa Bell by Sarah Milroy and Ian A. C. Dejardin, Andrew Cranston’s book of small works, Never a Joiner, with invaluable and challenging writing by him on each, and Mirror Matters, a monograph on Aubrey Levinthal, a young painter who lives in Philadelphia.

SOLD  acrylic and oil on collaged canvas, 100 x 100 x 3.8 cm

I painted the last stages of this while listening to Arundhati Roy read her new book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, about her mother and her own life. She was a great Beatles fan, and I guess she still is.

I painted the under layers and the lines, which are paint runs and glaze medium runs before I had worked out how the painting was going to be. In the autumn the echinacea petals shrivel but the cones are still colourful especially when the low autumn sun shines on them.

This painting is available from Graystone Gallery, in Edinburgh

acrylic and oil on collaged canvas, 100 x 100 x 3.8 cm

The faithful watering cans, the see-through garden – it has the echinaceas, the love-in-the-mist, the sunflowers, the bins, me in the greenhouse. It’s a bit wide-angle though. Some of the under-painting was just too lovely to paint over which is a good thing, I prefer not to fill the whole canvas with stuff happening.

The jaunty watering cans

oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

Self-portrait seems to be what I am painting at the moment. The mirror is on the windowsill and really old, probably Georgian, rather freckled and not a clear reflection, and the contre jour light makes it an interesting image. I got rid of any attempts at the view through the window – it was a bright autumn afternoon, and the face swims up from the room with little detail. A lot of scraping on and off.

acrylic, oil and metal foil on collaged canvas, 100 x 100 x 3.8 cm

This started with ideas about the piano because I was writing a  poem that included the Steinway concert grand I had piano lessons on as a teenager. Then I remembered the very pretty baby grand in an antique shop in Fakenham I used to wish I had room for.

Here is the watercolour I started with in my sketchbook. For reference I was looking at Steinway’s website and it struck me how the new piano strings were a very bright brassy colour, so I used some old metal foil – ie fake gold leaf – which I put on extremely messily. The piano lid makes me think of wings. Either the piano is an avenging angel about to eat me, or it is protecting me, I am not sure which.