‘The Mystery of Light: Tyntesfield’ oil on panel, 61 x 51 cm. AVAILABLE.
This is part of a large National Trust house near Bristol. The light of a bright day diffused through closed blinds. The stairs lead to rooms not normally open to the public, but they are open to our imagination. Seeing is feeling.
The Hypnos Bedroom' Oil on canvas 60 x 60cm. AVAILABLE.
This is in my house. Appropriately, in one bedroom there is an ancient Greek bronze of Hypnos, the personification of sleep. The reflections attracted me to creating this painting. They echo and distort reality, just like dreams do. A surreptitious self-portrait is a distant echo of Velasquez.
'Transition', oil on canvas, 104 x 100 cm. AVAILABLE. Familiar buildings seen from a distance as the sun sets. Bright gold and deep shadows. Silence. The transition is from day to night, and the transition is also the ever changing city as time passes. Like a glacier the slow inexorable march of time destroys as well as renews, and yet it leaves some things untouched by its progress. We are only fleeting witnesses to it all. The crushed perspective comes from the distant viewpoint, on top of a building in Leicester Square.
‘Pre-dawn reverie, Chichester’ oil on canvas 81 x 81 cm. AVAILABLE. One night I couldn’t sleep so I went for a long walk to clear my head. The weather was slightly misty with a fine drizzle of rain. No one was around. Later, I had to record what I saw in paint. The statue of Saint Richard seems to give his blessing to a former church across the road, now a pub. An enigmatic green light is reflected on the wet paving stones in the shadow of the cathedral. A kind of quiet magic happened.
‘The Calmness of Certainty (1) (Fishbourne Creek)’, Oil on canvas 85cm x 90cm. AVAILABLE. I like the way that the night can desaturate colours even when the moon is full and bright. This place is only about half a mile from my house. Astronomers can tell us when and where heavenly bodies will be in a certain place; it’s a certainty that gives reassurance, a predictability that gives us the kind of calmness we get from nature when we allow ourselves time to connect to it.
'And so it goes on…' Oil on canvas 100cm x 100cm. AVAILABLE. A view from high up on the edge of the City of London looking roughly east. This was my ‘lock-down’ project during the Covid pandemic. I’d already made a lot of drawings and photographs of this scene before the crisis, so I decided to make the most of this opportunity to make a major show-piece painting, spending a total of about 2000 hours on it. Being interested in history what first attracted me to the scene; it has a very wide range of historical buildings in it, from the Tower of London right up to the modern era, with many fine buildings from so many periods in between. It’s a large painting packed full of detail but technique and even content do not make a good painting, it’s art, or rather, how I turn nature into art. That splash of light from a sun trying to peak through dense rain clouds was what made me pursue this project more than anything else. The patterns, shapes and rhythms of this almost random mix of architecture also told a kind of subliminal story of their own.
'September Morning’ 81.5cm x 81.5 cm. AVAILABLE. This is part of the De Le Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex. This was built in 1935 in a classic modernist style. It’s one of my favourite buildings in England. With such a complex structure and equally complex perspective this was a very difficult and time-consuming painting to create, but it was an irresistible challenge. Being forced to look very carefully at a subject really helps in understanding it.
‘Moonstones 1’ 92 x 92 cm. SOLD. This is part of the stone circle in Brockley. From this viewpoint you wouldn’t know this is in London, but it is. Ah, those clouds….
‘Summer morning at Staffa’ 70 x 151.5 cm. AVAILABLE. The island of Staffa off the west coast of Scotland is famous for Fingal’s Cave and the amazing basalt rock formations on it. It’s only about sixty miles from the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland and it’s geologically connected to it. I was here whilst taking part in the Channel Five series ‘Britain’s Favourite Landscape’, this being one of two large paintings I did of this starkly beautiful place.
'Reflections by the river', 100 x 80 cm. AVAILABLE. This building is at the south end of London Bridge. The reflections show what’s behind the viewers back and, at the top, across the river Thames. The river itself can be glimpsed in a gap on the lower left. I like the ambiguity that reflections provide; they play with space and with our minds.
‘Seen and Unseen’ 81.5 x 81.5 cm. AVAILABLE. Brief shadows on a wall in Lewisham, South East London. Behind the wall is the oldest building in Lewisham called The Stone House. Feelings can’t always be described. Perhaps the biggest mystery about paintings like this is that at a subconscious level we all want them to answer questions that we can’t actually put into words; we want them to make sense of what we feel.
‘Packwood House topiary’ 28.5 x 38.5 cm. AVAILABLE. A part of the Yew Garden at a Tudor manor house in Warwickshire.
‘Canary Wharf, seen from Hilly Fields, Brockley’ 91 x 91 cm. SOLD. The setting sun shines on buildings near and far, with the houses falling under the shadow of a hill, on top of which are children’s playground equipment called ‘steppers and climbers’. Like many of my paintings it is square, with a central subject, against the ‘rules’ according to some; do I care? No. What attracted to me to this subject is the light, of course, but also the echo of the shapes of the gables on the houses with the top of Cabot Tower in the distance.
‘Fishbourne Creek with Salt Mill House’ 80 x 90 cm. AVAILABLE. This place is about eight minutes’ walk away from my house. The path next to the reedbeds gave me a pleasing composition, this and the natural colour harmony ought to please the viewer. Some paintings almost create themselves.
‘Rough seas at Staffa’ 91 x 91 cms. SOLD. A contrast to the other painting of Staffa, this dramatic scene shows the uninhabited island surrounded by fierce waves. The heaving and rolling of the water makes me be grateful to be standing on dry land. For thousands of miles to the west of this spot there is nothing but the Atlantic.
‘The garden of the chateau at Auver-sur-Oise, France’ 61 x 45cm. AVAILABLE. Within a short walk of where Vincent van Gogh lived and died, this is a more peaceful place that he, in the few peaceful times he knew there, would have known. Shapes can be fascinating.
‘Blickling Hall, Norfolk’ 91.5 x 71 cm. SOLD. This magnificent Jacobean house is in Norfolk. Rainy weather need not be miserable. Mood is a response that sometimes needs to be reflected on. Listen to the quiet ticking of rain; its serenity, its completeness. Watch as a passing shower intensifies colours. Sometimes there is luminosity in the shadows, especially during ‘rainbow weather’, when shafts of light can penetrate scudding clouds suggesting hope and change. Give yourself time to connect. The past was once the present, just as the present will soon be the past.
‘Brockley stone circle, summer sunshine’ 91.5 x 71 cm. AVAILABLE. Another painting of this stone circle in south east London. Why say more?
‘Waterloo East station’ 71 x 71 cm. AVAILABLE. How many of us have spent a large chunk of our lives standing on a train platform waiting for…some kind of progress in our lives? I know this station very well. One day it seemed like a good idea to turn the station as a metaphor for life into the station as a subject for a painting. The perspective and all those lines needed orchestrating as well as describing, so I settled on a square canvas (again) and then, very early one morning, I saw the right light for the right mood I wanted to depict. A time-consuming but atmospheric painting appeared.
‘Tide 1’ 91 x 91 cm. AVAILABLE. It’s a bit of an artistic cliché to say this, but this painting literally came to me in a dream. The unseen full moon lights the tide. The rhythmic pushing and pulling of the water is inexorable, hypnotic. Don’t stand too close – you’ll get your feet wet!
‘Balloon over Fountains Abbey’ 73.5 x 73.5 cm. SOLD. Another painting that came to me in a dream. This did actually happen, in a sense; well, in my sleeping mind at least. A curious, tranquil and amazing scene; what does it say about me? I’ll let you decide. It would be nice if people thought I am curious, tranquil and amazing, but I don’t think they ever will.
‘Cullernose Point, Northumberland’ 91 x 56 cm. SOLD. A rare painting from me because it’s in a vertical format. The scene almost begged to be painted. Such a lot can be said with a very limited palette of colours, all anchored on grey. I like grey. It’s all around us, and yet to many people this colour seems to have negative connotations; it shouldn’t. To me it’s a friendly, modest and welcoming colour that can be friends with any of its ‘louder’ neighbours or, in a painting like this, almost be the subject of a painting.
‘Kirby Hall, nocturne’ 100 x 100 cm. AVAILABLE. This is part of an Elizabethan country house in Northamptonshire. Now here’s a question for you to answer; please dig deep and be honest. Why are nocturnal paintings so often see as being melancholy? Isn’t there something truly beautiful about the night, especially when the moon is bright and peace is all around us? Yes, you did just hear the distant hoot of an owl.
‘Speke Hall’ 28 x 39 cm. AVAILABLE. The path in front of a Tudor Timber-framed manor house on the banks of the River Mersey. This is a small painting but I love it. There’s a simple pleasure to be had in shapes.
‘Brockley Stone Circle, moonlight’ 91.5 x 71 cm. SOLD. Another painting of this stone circle in south east London. An even more limited palette centred on blue. This kind of lighting is often used in theatres to represent night or darkness when the subject still needs to be seen by an audience. Our eyes read it as natural when it isn’t, and so this is what I tried to do here, just to see if it would work. I think it does. This place is real, the light is as real as your mind lets it be. Maybe last night, maybe tonight, this place can be seen just as it is here…
‘Dawn, St Jan’s cathedral, ‘s-Hertogenbosch’ 100 x 100 cm. SOLD. My mother was Dutch, and this is where all of her family come from, with at least one branch that I’ve traced back to the year 1250. This place means a lot to me. It is resonant with history, and it is one of the few cities in Europe where the cathedral still dominates the city. Almost every stone and brick of this city carry memories for me.
‘Viking Longships’ 50.5 x 50.5 cm. SOLD. An imaginary view. These ships were very beautiful and yet at the same time for many on whose shores they arrived they were terrifying. It’s sometimes better to have your eyes open when you imagine things.
‘Harewood House peacock’ 86 x 50 cm. AVAILABLE. It’s there. We’re here. His gaze fixed in paint, yours at this computer screen. A decorative painting, in the best sense of that word, and another rare foray into a vertical format painting.
‘Rye Marshes’ 45 x 60 cm. AVAILABLE. Rye is in East Sussex. This view from the top of a church really had to be painted. The sun’s rays cast their benevolent light over sea and marsh as if God himself is about to appear, or perhaps that huge foot from Monty Python.
‘Stone and Crows’ Oil on panel 28 x 40 cm. AVAILABLE. Knowing the stone circle at Brockley so well this is a rare instance of the title of a painting occurring to me before I started developing ideas for the actual image. It is of course a variation on the old exclamation ‘stone the crows!’. Crows are clever creatures, I’d never want to stone them.
‘The Other Side’ 35 x 35 cm. AVAILABLE. The old saying ‘less is more’ meaning that the less of something that is presented to us the more we’ll understand, is what lay behind this painting. It’s inspired by the minimalist music of Brian Eno, and especially his first collection of short atmospheric pieces of music called ‘Music for Films’. The phrase ‘the other side’ has several meanings in English, for example literally, like the distant land you can see here in this painting, or spiritual, meaning the afterlife. With Eno’s music and, hopefully my painting, these things are not mutually exclusive. Our imaginations can take us anywhere.
‘Tidy Nature’ Oil on panel 26 x 18 cm. AVAILABLE. A still life painting that I did many years ago. The name of the plastic ‘desk tidy and finding a sprig of oak leaves one day just made an image that I though worked.
‘Another day on Earth’ 96 x 127 cm. AVAILABLE. This painting takes its name from a song by Brian Eno. At first this was going to be an aviation painting with a beautiful seaplane as its subject but I stopped myself after the sea had turned out so well. The immensity and blandness of the sea (at least on that day) seemed to say something about how the Earth just carried on doing what it does whatever we do.
‘Rocks near Eyemouth 2’ 38 x 50.5 cm. AVAILABLE. Eyemouth is on the east coast of Scotland. One of the best things about oil painting is using the huge rich palette of colours available to match the rich colours we see in nature. Well, ok, is ‘match’ a good word? No, perhaps emulate, maybe even worship. In one way or another we’re all slaves to nature.
‘Raph with bass’ 110 x 80 cm. SOLD. I very rarely do portraits. This isn’t because of any lack of skill, it’s just a different area of art from what I’m used to. Also, it’s because they’re so heavily loaded with psychological baggage. As soon as a portrait is started there are different expectations on either side of that easel. Luckily, in this case Raphael Mizraki is a friend, and he had no expectations, vanity or special wishes when I suggested this portrait. He’s an enormously – almost crazily – talented man who I’ve known for years.
‘In Defence of the Realm’ 71 x 91.5 cm. SOLD. This is an Elizabethan ‘race-built’ galleon. This painting is a kind of fantasy, inspired as much by the kinds of books on nautical history I grew up with as the actual appearance of the real thing.
‘Old gate, Selsey’ 28 x 40 cm. SOLD. I painted this several years ago. Even back then it had fallen into neglect, and by now I imagine by now it will have been annihilated by storms and the sea air. I wonder who was the last person to walk through here?
‘The Golden Lion in a stiff breeze’ 80 x 100 cm. SOLD. This was a real ship, part of the Dutch navy during one of the wars with the English during the seventeenth century.
‘Arbor Low, Derbyshire’ 90 x 70 cm. AVAILABLE. This is part of Arbor Low, an ancient stone circle in Derbyshire. It’s on private land but if you enter via a farmer’s gate you can walk up to it as long as you put a payment of £1 into the box beside the gate. How very English. It’s another very powerfully atmospheric place, sometimes called ‘The Stonehenge of the North’. Even those who are stone-hearted are emotionally moved in such places; why? We only know they mattered a lot once. Maybe they still do in ways we can’t put into words.
‘Staffa Rocks’ 91 x 66 cm. AVAILABLE. Clear water reflecting the sky. Basalt rock columns, many millions of years old around a bizarre coastline stand waiting to receive my feet and my admiration. (see my other paintings of Staffa too).
‘Brockley Stone Circle, early Autumn evening’ 61 x 90.5 cm. Slanting golden sunlight. What more do I have to say?AVAILABLE.
‘Lighthouse 2’ 38 x 40 cm. AVAILABLE. A painting inspired by a gorgeous and strange piece of music called ‘Layering Buddha’ by the German electronic musician Robert Henke. The slow blinking of the lighthouse if both a reassuring sign as well as a warning of danger.
‘Coles shop’ 35.5 x 35.5 cm. NOT FOR SALE. One of my first oil paintings done many years ago. This shop in Leyton, east London, was near where I grew up. This shop was an amazing place, not just selling the things it describes outside (including the mis-spelt word ‘stationary’) but inside it was a kind of museum dedicated to the shop’s owner who, in his younger years used to ride a racing motorbike. He even had his original bike on a slowly revolving stand at the back of the shop. Strong and poignant memories for him, and now he and his shop are all long gone, for me too.
‘Orkney standing stones’ 65 x 83 cm. AVAILABLE. The Orkneys are a group of Islands of the north coast of Scotland, but they don’t see themselves as Scottish; historically and culturally they have far more links with Scandinavia. These standing stones are part of the magnificent ‘ring of Brodgar’, a place that’s so very resonant with layers of meaning and purpose that we can barely articulate, seeing and feeling say more than words, especially in a place that’s so windy!
‘The Formby’ 71 x 91.5 cm. AVAILABLE. A nineteenth century clipper ship in full sail. Just imagine being there. Listen to the sounds around you.
‘Brighter Later’ (Fishbourne Creek) 101 x 101 cm. AVAILABLE. A painting showing part of Fishbourne Creek, only about ten minutes’ walk from my home. The title comes from a Nick Drake song.
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