Health benefits of fresh air and egrets

Feeling a bit under the weather lately (oh, poor me), I determined to take some air and partake of a brief constitutional along the Meols/Hoylake promenade on the Wirral coast, along which perambulation I passed this painting, which I made about 4 years ago. It’s one of several paintings made by Wirral artists – mainly…

Postman Pat gone Delft

A wee while ago, I set students at one of my art classes a light-hearted challenge to design their own Delft tile. The challenge was intended to inject a bit of variety into the classes and to see what individual, personal designs each student could come up with. We didn’t work on tiles, but the…

Leafy Clementines in a Plastic Punnet

I’ve been researching aspects of the working methods of Cézanne and Renoir recently, in preparation for two of my art workshops. A plastic punnet of leafy clementines caught my eye in the kitchen yesterday (planted there for this reason by my wife as it turns out) and I thought it a good subject with which…

Blue Lilies in a Blue Room

On a recent visit to a supermarket I was taken with some blue lilies, which I thought might make an interesting subject for a new still life painting. How natural they are we’re not too sure of – they certainly struggled to open. However, I did enjoy putting this painting together. Unaware of the slow…

Sunflowers, 31 July 2013

I’ve not been doing much drawing or painting of late. The one painting on which I have sporadically been working (a relatively large painting of Kew Gardens from a photograph I took a few years ago) seems to be taking an eternity. When paintings take so long they tend to wear down my energy and…