For Freedom

 I'm now working on my current painting 'Dreamtime'  having just stained the canvas, Cadmium Red. Once it was dry I started painting in the 'freedom' areas using very loose brushwork with the marks based on some of my landscape sketches from  trips to Wicken Fen.

I wanted to create the feeling of movement so that when I paint the disintegrating puppet theatres over the top (and the animals escaping) it will all be in a state of constant flow.

You can see my efforts so far on my latest Facebook and Instagram posts. 

High Hopes

 I've just posted on Facebook and Instagram, a picture of my painting 'Young Lives' which I made in 1993. It portrays the ten Coney cousins as DNA structures personalised by ephemera they had collected for me over a six month period. Love letters, airline tickets, bills - I got it all!

The picture is over 6 feet tall and I remember it was hell to work on. Often I would put it it on the floor and lay down beside it, while other times I would prop the canvas horizontally on chairs and kneel down to paint.

I was a lot younger then, ofcourse. Nowadays I try to remain seated as much as possible.

New Beginings

 I've finally finished my painting 'Memento Mori and Johnathan is going to collect it next week to get it framed.

I've stuck  up all my new artists and cultural references on the drawing board (see picture on my Facebook and Instagram posts) to inspire me and continued with my experiments for my new picture 'Dreamtime'.

I'm working on two preliminary canvases at the moment and think I'm nearly ready to start the final piece.

Ofcourse I still feel nervous about committing to canvas but I like that edgy feeling when you don't quite know what you're doing ?!

The Wrong Wasp

 I was remined that last Christmas, I  received a beautiful book of photographs of wasps from my wife.

She had forgotten that I had abandoned the idea of placing wasps in my painting 'The Wasp and The Ring' fairly early on, as being too literal. Although I'd  made a study of a wasp in the Zoology Museum, this  changed to  Roman soldiers attacking the 'ring', instead.

This idea developed from selecting the holy family  to represent the main characters in the picture. 

As I used the models from our nativity scene to work from, I also purloined King Herod's soldiers as well.