“Peter Pug” has left home to go and live with the newly weds Tasha and Adam Neil over in Coleraine, Northern Ireland – I am sure he will be very happy in his new home and family! 🙂
Here he is in Northern Ireland checking the place out, while he waits on his new owners to decide where to put him.
This oil painting is of two sun-bathed Gower ponies which roam the common land of Gower Pensinsula near Swansea in Wales, UK. It is great having ponies, horses, sheep and cows (even young bulls!) roaming this diverse countryside, walking pretty much wherever they fancy or so it seems. I am blessed to live near it all. I have tried try to catch the beauty, calm and peacefulness of these beautiful animals.
This painting “A Summered Garden” is one of my favourite paintings, recently painted a few weeks ago. As such, it takes “pride of place” above the living room mantelpiece, beside my recent portrait of my husband and a small photo of our wedding, although Hattie, one of my cats seems unimpressed.
I like to show my paintings in lived in environments so that artlovers can see how they may look on their walls too!
My recent return to painting after a week away saw me follow up my Puffins series of paintings – these are Pop Art type paintings of these lovely birds. The last Puffin painting “Puffin Paradise” sold after a few days! If only they all went that quickly eh? I like doing them, they are fun to paint; fresh, simply and colourful. They kind of make you smile!
I have been off holidaying in the Black Mountains which are part of the Brecon Beacons National Park and did not paint for a whole week which was very difficult.
I am sure I was experiencing withdrawal like symptoms.
Anyway I am back and in the groove with a new painting “Puffin in the Pink”.
This self portrait is inspired by a painting by Matisse, “The Green Line” or “The Green Stripe”, also known as the Portrait of Madame Matisse, which was a portrait of his wife. I just loved, the name, the use of different colours in the background and the bold use of different colours on the sitter’s face, particularly the “green line”.
I have tried to re-interpret this effect in a post fauvist or refractionist way. I have heightened the colours created by light following on different parts on my face, head and shoulders to show how light creates so many colours that our perception “washes” out or blends into one composite image.
I love painting snow, whether brillant midday sun, blue-tinged, snow or pinky sunset snow. I love how blues and pinks hover above the snowy white. I love the snow’s power to transform, to turn a plain town into a lovely town, and a lovely town in something quite majestic. In “Crick in the Snow, the lovely village of Crickhowell in the Brecons is transformed into a picture-postcard beauty by the snow and the dramatic background of the snow glistering hills.
I live by the sea where the salty sea erodes most heavy snow drifts. Thus I have to travel inland to the Welsh Valleys and beyond to find my snow-laden landscapes. In this painting I love the intricacy of the hedgerows climbing up the hills, the lacy threads of winter hedges, the patterns, and the line and shapes. It has a “brueghelian” Christmas feel. All that is missing is the sleighing children and swirling skates. I love the warm colours of the houses in the foreground contrasting with the cold blues in the distant countryside. The habitable back-lit with the inhabitable. This heightens the feeling of Christmas, all wrapped up in each other’s shops and homes, and lives; reassuringly, comfortably, necessarily away from the icy outside, the outer reaches, around this human fire of company. This is a painting of a winter community as well as winter community more generally.
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“Perpetual Light”
People have commented variously how this painting “captures sunshine”, “reminds me of hope”…and sometimes comments inform you about what the painting evokes in others and in a sense what it is about, almost.. The subject material here is one of my very favourite chapels in Wales. Not only is it the smallest but I also love it’s crooked bell tower. Mostly, I love how it is bathed in traditional Welsh white, unusual in that most chapels are not these days. This white helps catch the brillance of the sunshine, which puts it in start contrast to the “gloom” of the gravestones.Personally, unlike most perhaps, I love graveyards, particularly old ones; I love the gravestones and how they tell a thousand stories of people who have passed on but still “alive” in the memories and stories left behind. Some other comments have mentioned how the painting rises above the death association. I think it has done so because there is an intrinsic hope in sunshine isn’t there – that is what I have tried to capture in the sun. It is also clear that light and dark need each other, shadow and brilliance. Despair and hope. Beyond the graves there is a light, and the title of the painting points to a Christian reference, mentioned in relation to those who have moved on, “Let perpetual light shine upon him/her…”, so there is hope in this message, for some, of eternal light beyond the grave.
I love painting snow, whether brillant midday sun, blue-tinged, snow or pinky sunset snow. I love how blues and pinks hover above the snowy white. I love the snow’s power to transform, to turn a plain town into a lovely town, and a lovely town in something quite majestic. In “Crick and Surrounds” the lovely village of Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog) is transformed into a picture-postcard beauty by the snow and the dramatic background of the snow glistering hills. It is hugged by the hills behind or cwtch-ed as they say in Wales.
This closeness to nature is heightened by how I have bunched up the buildings and how I have tried to drape bright invigorating winter light and reassuring black velvet shadows across the roof tops. The fluffy clouds and soft blanketed snow lying sturdily across the roof tops are in contrast the cool blue streaks of paint and there is something almost edible in this effect, it almost contains a child like yearning in it’s invitation to explore this crisp wintry ice creamy joy.
See available paintings of the area here
Oil painting on linen canvas – I use a linen canvas with a white covering for certain types of painting such as landscapes set in Wales as there is a particular type of “Welsh light” that can be captured accurately on this type of canvas. It is extraordinary how a canvas is so conducive to a certain “national light” but all light is different depending on where one is located in the world. My husband hails for the north of Ireland where the light is brighter and more shrill, high pitched, more crisply blue white, whereas in Wales, it is often slightly or noticeably softer and in certain places tinged with warmer yellowy white. Although in this painting which is heading towards West Wales, and towards the Irish Sea the light has become more crisp and slightly tinged with blue. One can almost feel the lung filling fresh air in the blowing clouds and nasal tinging blue sky.
