You go to my head

You Go To My Head.  Oil on canvas

One of the paintings I am going to show at Parkfields Gallery Ross-on-Wye at the end of July. The partner to All The Things You Are, painted two years earlier and now sold.

 All The Things You Are.  Oil on canvas

The walk home through the city

The Walk Home Through the City. oil on canvas

A reminder that a few months ago when I painted this I walked through grey, cold Cardiff streets. Today the sun was shining as I took the same walk. What a difference a bit of sunshine does for the spirits!

Back to France

 Le Tour de Montcuq. oil on canvas


Painted in Montcuq, brought back to Wales and now on the way back across the channel -  "Around Montcuq" was bought by my Australian neighbours in France and collected from Cardiff on the weekend. It's nice to know that should I leave France the painting hanging in a house in Montcuq is a small sign that I was once here!

Coast

 

Coast - oil on canvas

It's South of France weather but my work is firmly embedded in South Wales. The radio this morning said that we are going to have wet summers for the next 10 years so just for today I'll eat my lunch in the garden and soak up the sun - enough to last me 10 years, and then I'll go back to painting coastlines.

Summer came and went.

A trip to West Wales to deliver paintings to the gallery in St Davids should have been a pretty drive but heavy mist and light rain meant that I couldn't see anything much of the landscape. Instead I used the time to  ponder on the general unease I feel when heading west out of Cardiff. It seems an alien world and when the M4 runs out soon after Swansea the strangeness intensifies. Point me instead eastwards where the signs read Newport, Cwmbran, Usk, Abergavenny and further on London and I'm really at home.

The studio - a special place.

Maybe triggered by a radio programme some weeks ago about artists' studios and a re-read of Alexander Liberman's The Artist in his Studio, on the train home from work yesterday I started thinking about the studios I've had over the years. I counted twelve. Some in cramped spaces and sometimes, in desperation, I worked from home. On one occasion I occupied a complete floor of a building with the choice of numerous empty rooms. I've used rooms in peoples' houses on payment of a painting and even painted outside in the garden when there was no other space.
It got me thinking about the nature and importance of the space in which I work.
Beggars can't be choosers and although light and space are the usual prerequisites I've often had to accept less than ideal. But one thing I have to be sure of - I have to be alone. 
I like the sounds of traffic, of people, of things going on in the outside world - they don't distract me. My mind is solely on the canvas and the palette. I have ideas of going out for coffee and bringing back lunch. In fact I do none of these things. I start work and lose all sense of time. When I leave, it's to go home.