I’ve been working on this painting for five days now. At the beginning, I was feeling a mixture of excitement and anxiety, as I usually do. Excitement at what the picture could be, and anxiety that I won’t be able to get it there. When I’m working on a painting for more than a day,
Dream Big, Take Small Steps
We’re snowed in again and the power has gone. I’m looking out over a landscape made fresh by deep snow. A new year is here. And as always, with it comes the urge to make changes. Usually, we try to make big changes. Often, a few of them at once. Which, you know as well
Give yourself permission (to take the one big step you need to take)
I’m profoundly grateful to you. If you’re reading this, I want you to know that. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I’ve had a few wobbles in the last couple of years. Now I wake up every day to breathtakingly beautiful countryside and a happy family. And the thing is, I
Winter in Uley
At first, I was slightly disappointed that we’d arrived in Uley right at the end of Autumn. It was stunningly beautiful, but it was a transitory beauty that was already changing quickly into winter. The golden leaves were falling and the trees were a little more bare every day. It made me sad because we
Working on my “Na”
I was sitting on the floor of a small home in Kolkata, northern India, where I’d be staying for the next three months. I had my tabla ready in front of me. I had no idea what to expect. Jayanta, my new tabla teacher, had just seated himself opposite me. He didn’t speak a word
Getting Started
Uley Bury, an iron age hill fort, behind Uley village 8:30 AM. We’re in the car, taking the kids to school. As we drive up the steep, narrow, twisty road out of the Uley valley and on to the edge of the Cotswolds escarpment I catch my breath at the natural splendour of this place,
A New Day
We’d been on the motorway for 6 hours, stuck in a traffic Jam. The kids were going crazy. The cat, perched between the kids in the back, was miaowing loudly and clawing at the door of the cat box. Michelle and I had both had about an hour’s sleep the previous night, and we were
Why I Don’t Paint from Photographs
I’ve been criticised for painting from photographs. Once, someone asked in the comments to a post why I was copy-painting (his term) a perfectly good photograph. Kind of ironic because it wasn’t a photograph at all, I was working from life. In fact, I never work from photographs. This is the picture that provoked that
How I use Underpainting to Influence the Final Painting
Now that I’m full time at this and painting a lot more, I have more opportunity to try things out and develop my painting process as I go. I’m going to try to post a bit more here about how my process is changing currently, and how I put my paintings together, since it might
Why Accuracy?
I get asked quite a lot about the emphasis I put on accuracy. Most often, people are curious about whether I think you should always strive for accuracy, or whether it’s something you just do for a while, when you’re learning, and then relax at some point. The questions usually take one of two forms