Insubstantial leanings surrounded by thoughts/ New Title LOOKING BACK

This painting has had many lives and the content, whilst always focussing on the girl at the centre of the work, has metamorphosed considerably. It's a large painting, maybe the largest I've worked on but still clings to the notion of figure in space/place. 

Blue Shadow

Experimenting with new materials can often offer new ways of working.

The young painter Nick Lord who won the commission to paint Hilary Mantel uses thin acrylic glazes to build up a portrait, they're very beautiful. This is just me playing at using acrylic glazes and I realized how atmospheric they can be. Will definitely use again.

Yellow field with house

A very textured simplistic painting. I've used the almost child-like depiction of the house in a much bigger painting, metaphorically suggestion our childlike idea of home as a special place.

Pink sky behind lighthouse

Living in London offers a very urban experience a lot of the time so I wanted to paint an abstracted version of the sea and a lighthouse to remind me of the amazing north eastern coastline around Whitley Bay, a view I realize I took for granted. This is a large painting.

Bird 0907

Bird 0906

Bird 0905

Bird 0904

Walthamstow Arts Festival offered our art studios Inky Cuttlefish stalls so I had the chance to sit and work out in the open while showing some of my work. I managed to get myself organised enough to draw up 4 bird images and completed painting all 4 on the day, intense but fun and lots of people stopped to chat and ask questions.

Happy Birthday Pops

I was running out of time to paint something for my daughter Poppy's birthday so this painting had to be executed quickly and as a consequence is a bit slapdash. It's a bit clown-like but hopefully isn't a complete failure...alas Poppy didn't like it.

Surrounded by obstacles and the moon

This is quite a large square painting which turned out much more colourful than I had intended. It began as a much more simple painting but the figure crept into it. I like the idea that an indiscriminate red mark lurches across from one side of the painting to the other linking the two sides of the image.

Girl at a Window

Many artists have painted an image of a young girl or woman at a window from Dali, Cassatt, Vermeer, Balthus and of course Rembrant's painting at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

I painted this quite quickly and liked the idea that someone is taking some time to look out onto the world, either a garden or a street. I like the geometry of this image where the girl's body lies at the meeting point of 3 lines.

Face with Red Scarf

This is a very quick painting I did on paper a couple of years ago but i've recently worked on it again with dark glazes.

Thin, oily, transparent layers of glazes give the painting a glow and often help bring more life to a painting. I love using dark glazes, they add a richness to the work very quickly without losing detail.

Blue Sky and harbour

Back after an interlude of about 9 months. I've still been painting while enjoying Poppy and Ben's wedding, child-minding my gorgeous grand-daughter Eliza and renovating my second property since moving to London 18 months ago.

This small painting was painted in oils on a block of wood 20cms x 20cms and has been sold.