Month: Apr 2022
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Many moons
I’ve painted the moon many times, often with Venus. Any conjunction between the moon and Venus will always be stunning — Venus is the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the moon and together they are particularly spectacular. To me they seem to be old friends — revelling in each other’s beauty and…
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Self portraits, in profile
I’ve always thought people’s faces look more interesting in profile. You’re able to see bone structure more clearly and the shape of the nose. I think the nose is the defining point of someone’s face — especially of interest to me is that angle between the top of the nose and where the inner eye…
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Portraits of Dennis Skinner
I met former Labour MP Dennis Skinner (the ‘Beast of Bolsover’) at the Houses of Parliament on five occasions, in 2017. He’d agreed to meet me after I emailed him and asked if I could paint him. I won’t forget the time I spent listening to his stories and his singing (he’d often break into…
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Edie and me on the Tube
There’s not a lot going on in this painting, so it seems. Two figures inhabit a shared space and we hardly see their faces (only a sliver of mine in profile). They are together, yet very much preoccupied with their own thoughts. There is a sense that the child is leaning towards a different reality…
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Portraits of left-wing figures
It’s possible, and I think healthy too, to believe in something but also be able to be critical of it. I’m a socialist, but I think it’s fair to say that ‘the Left’, as the general voice we hear, is not in a great position right now. Something that particularly worries me is the issue…
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Southgate tube platform
This is where my painting really began, in 2011-12, with Southgate tube platform. It’s the first painting I sold and the first painting which I felt was a successful, complete piece of work. It was sold to the general secretary of the Friends of the London Transport Museum, who wrote a small piece about it…
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Franz Kline, self portraits
I’ve written before that my first love when it comes to painting is expressionism (particularly German expressionism) but actually, I have two first loves. The other is, maybe strangely for a figurative painter, abstract expressionism. Painters of this genre that have particularly interested me are Mark Rothko (even though he didn’t align himself with any…
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‘For us there is only the trying’
I studied T.S. Eliot as part of my degree in English and Philosophy (from the University of South Wales) but I’d only really started to appreciate him in the past ten years or so. After hearing Ralph Fiennes read Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London in December, the appreciation turned to…
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Self portrait with night-blooming jasmine
I love the Greek islands and feel especially drawn to Crete. So far, I’ve explored pretty much all of the north coast from Stalis going west as far as beyond Chania to Falasarna. I have a fantasy of living in Crete and spending all my days painting in the shade of olive groves, living in…
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Detail, self portrait
This is a close up of a self portrait painted in 2021. I had just gone through an extremely difficult time. It wasn’t easy to return to painting and I decided to find my way back in through a self portrait. Looking at the painting now, I can see how I painted myself as a…