Art and artists

Fruit in Still Life

My work hangs in private collections as well as in public spaces and I have contributed to various  local exhibitions. I work primarily in acrylics and am increasingly more attracted to oils.

There is a series of 5 paintings I based loosely on the Carlisle city skyscape as seen from the River Caldew which can be seen in the Milbourne Street Library in Carlisle.
The painting ‘Poppies’ was shown in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle as was ‘Fruit Still Life’.

‘Urizen’ was especially painted for the recent exhibition in the Bank Gallery Carlisle commemorating the 250th birthday of William Blake.

I have recently been working on a series of smaller works inspired by Howard Hodgkin’s abstractions and have donated one of the most recent series to a private serious art collector in Brampton.

The paintings ‘Tulips’and ‘Fruit Still Life’ show my abiding interest in playing with the still life genre.

These paintings were inspired directly by the 17C Dutch School and are mixed media work. I intend to work with this genre more this year using classical oils and refining my sketching technique. ‘Tulips’, ‘Fruit Still Life’ and to a lesser extent ‘Poppies’ using a technique called ‘scraffito’ in which the end of the brush is used over layers of wet paint to etch through exposing the layers of paint below. This is the reverse of the traditional ‘sketch then paint over’ method. In this technique it is essential to build up paint layers of colours you later wish to expose using the scraffito method.

I came upon this method as I was very impressed with the softness in the work of Donald Wilkinson (another Cumbrian artist). Donald works in watercolour. But I wanted to see if I could use the often brash nature of acrylic to achieve a similar soft focus look. You can be the judge of whether I have succeeded or not!