Ok – a new year and a chance to look ahead.

The event of this year will be a gallery show at the Espacio Gallery with four other artist friends

from 23 October to the 28th with the private view on the 23rd from 6 -9pm to which you are all invited!

My hopes over Christmas was for one or both of my paintings to be accepted for the Royal Watercolour Society exhibition at the Bankside Gallery in March, but that is not going to happen as neither got accepted. I still think they are good works so I will try again elsewhere.

There seems to be too much going on in life at present, but I have done some very vigorous paintings using the sketches from my grid drawings and have been experimenting on just how far to take this abstraction. No real objective yet, but I am taking more liberties with colour and form and some of the work is moving away from the direct representations of the sketches. It can feel rather aimless moving shapes and textures around, but this is the only way to know where the boundaries are – if any, and then see what emerges. I have been painting fairly large (60x60cm.boards ) at the moment so that I can feel the expression from large brush work and which I find easier to overpaint and rework larger areas when I don’t have to worry about fine edges on a small board.

I get the jitters now and again thinking that I am losing the ‘landscape’ aspect of my work, but then I keep reminding myself that all this is coming from initial landscape sketches and it is rooted in a real experienced scene.

My present thoughts are concerning the background colours of new work; as most paintings up to now have started off from a textured light coloured ground, it may be time to see if large dominant underpainting will create the theme colours for new paintings, and will set the mood  of what goes over?

I hope you all like the new look website. As you will notice I have pruned down most of the older work now and will keep a closer account of what goes on to it from now on. I might make up an archive gallery at some time for some of the best older work, but this is not my priority at present.