oil on gessoed and cradled board, 20 x 20 cm, 2025

This little painting is the story of our first night in a cottage in Dumfries and Galloway, Squirrel Cottage. On holiday with my daughter this March, which I have not written up in my blog yet, I woke in the night and found that Lucy had decamped into my bedroom because there were weird noises in hers and she couldn’t sleep. So here she is on the floor on her mattress with little Nonna, and the curtains wide open and the pine martens who were probably the cause of the noise looking in. (We did not  actually have the curtains open) In the morning we found the feeder table knocked over, but when it was back up we had lovely daytime views of red squirrels, woodpeckers and lots of little woodland birds right outside the window. The cottage, an old estate gamekeeper’s house, with kennels in the garden, was surrounded by trees and rather lonely and it very much spooked my horror-film fanatic daughter.

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?

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.