Blog

  I’m always on the lookout for willing life models, and being stuck at home during lockdown with grownup children returning from their cancelled lives was too good an opportunity to miss. I decided weeks ago to try and use this strange time to make a painting about family, the complete absence of social distancing […]

  One of the treats of lockdown for me has been taking the amazing Zoey Frank’s Multifigure Composition Workshop. She has given nearly two hundred painters from around the world a marvellous series of talks every Friday for the last month on how she approaches composition via zoom, quite a feat! Each week we have […]

Tate Modern’s Pierre Bonnard Exhibition, the Colour of Memory has been one of my high points of the last year. Some much loved old favourites like his Bol Du Lait were on show, but there was one new painting I kept returning to that I just couldn’t get out of my head, his Venus De Cyrene. […]

I took part in a panel discussion on contemporary drawing other day with fellow NEAC painters Paul Newland, Toby Ward and Ben Hughes on why we draw, below is an edited version of my talk: A while ago Andrew Graham Dixon gave a robust argument for drawing skills on Radio 4’s Start The Week: He […]

Three things happened recently that have prompted me to write a blog piece after a long absence: I saw the Paul Nash exhibition in London, my son is reading Siegfried Sassoon’s war poetry at school, and Trump became the President Elect of the United States. What connects all three is Nash’s painting On Menin Road. […]

By the time you get to my age there have been a lot of painting loves, I am very torn between long term affairs and current crushes. A few contenders: Duccio’s jewel bright comic strip of the Passion of Christ, Piero Della Francesca’s Miracle of the True Cross cycle, Hugo van der Goes Portinari Altarpiece. […]

I have three pictures in an the exhibition ‘Still ALive’ at the Mall Galleries that opened this week. it is a small exhibition in the Threadneedle Space of twenty or so painters showing a very varied approach to the Still Life genre, and contains some real delights including a large Arthur Neal entitled ‘Studio’. Each […]

Duccio’s Passion of Christ- a painter’s pespective More Traveller’s Tales:-I revisited an old friend in Siena this summer, one I had met many times before but this time we managed a quiet hour together instead of a rushed conversation in a crowd. The friend in question is Duccio’s Maesta, specifically the Passion of Christ on […]

This was originally posted last December on the NEAC blog What a busy week for the NEAC! I’ll start at the end with a delightful opening ceremony at the private view that had the youngest member (bar one) Alex Fowler honouring the oldest member (bar none) Margaret Thomas. They both made splendid speeches and Margaret […]

This was originally posted in November 2012 on the NEAC Blog. We took my in laws to Venice this week to celebrate my father in law’s eightieth birthday. The tourists had fled the floods and the rain and left Venice to the Venetians, most of whom were old and in furs so the city was […]