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.

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

To be honest I don’t have a good title for this one yet. 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 stretched though. Some of the under-painting was just too lovely to paint over.

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.

acrylic and oil on collaged canvases, 120 x 80 cm

Another sofa vision – this is my dog’s sofa – she stretches right across it. It’s an antique and could do with a bit of attention. Behind it, in the bow window I have installed a roller for my bike. It is so hilly here and the roads so scary with potholed edges I decided that the only way I was going to use it was as a static bike. With more flowers from the prairie garden, rudbeckia and asters.

Pedalling off into the blue yonder.

Oil on canvas, 99 x 99 cm, 2025

I have been playing with still lives as part of interiors, and this one is on the ottoman box draped with an old Turkish kelim that I use as a coffee table.

Prairie flowers from the garden against the light, Bims the Spanish hound and me on the sofa, and my bike on rollers behind the geraniums in the bow window.