Mr Elephant

This one was done about 2 years. Nowadays I do much less copying from photos, unless they are ones I've taken myself.

Tired, but happy

A twenty minute sketch of my daughter during a game of football with me and her brother on a wintry day. Had to clear the snow from the basketball court before we could kick a ball!

Saturday chat

Taken from the Arts4every1 session. I arrived late and this was a relatively quick sketch.

Tastertainment March 2013

This is an on location sketch of a performer at what I believe was the second Tastertainment session run by Arts4every1 in high Wycombe. It was very well run and the home made chicken and mushroom soup went down a treat!

Outside Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford

This sketch was done with a permanent sketching pen from a photo taken when we were on our Harry Potter trail around Oxford. I just liked the look of the lantern.

Dynamos

This was a oil sketch of a friends child playing football. I never really intended for it to achieve any level of completion but it was pleasing to the eye so I blocked in the pitch and it made it easier to see the two players in action. The green was pretty hard to achieve as I didn't want this to blend in with the great of the grass. Just about got away with it.

Derry Sounds

This is a painting based on a black and white photo taken from the childhood of Mervyn Cooke, a poet based in High Wycombe. Mervyn wrote this poem based around the photo and his childhood memories of life of a farm in Derry.

Check out his blog at :-
http://poetryinpubs.blogspot.co.uk/

The poem is as follows:-

Derry Sounds

The burn would run all night and morning
Gurgling seductively outside my bedroom window
Golden brown and bubbling over the peat-moss moors
Sounds of scratching fowls and swishing cows
Cud-chewing to the milking parlour

A sow screamed at the runt of the litter
And I with one eye opened, feel the gentle Derry air
Lift the lace curtain and blow in a ‘good morning’
With its sickly smell of sweet manure
Freshly squeezed milk from bloated udders

A clang of creamery cans
A ‘get-out-of-here’ cry to cats
That craved fresh cream
And I awake on my uncle’s farm
Oh sweet, sweet memory

Mothers Day

Hi Mum,

This one is for you - this was fro the time that you were playing with Charlotte and the strange dangly wonden flying thing. Sorry if she looks older than you! Have a great day.

Rory

Sunset

Going through the back catalogue here. This was a straight copy of a sunset when I had first got back into doing oils. It works quite well as a painting, nice colours, acceptable composition but doesn't pass the sincerity test as it's just a copy of a photograph of a scene at which I was not present. Still, it did make me feel like could achieve something in paint.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien

I initially decided to paint Keith O'Brien as the circumstances around him leaving office were quite current, particularly in the context of the Pope deciding to stand down. What struck me as I painted this was that if these Cardinals have power now, then imagine what it might have been like in the Middle Ages when I suspect the cardinals would still have been dressed in the same way and the populace around the would not have been nearly so educated as they are now and the mystique around the written word would have been very powerful. These Cardinals would have been a powerful bunch supported by the might of the church (alluded to in the background) and, of course God!

I struggled with the face on this one, a slightly jokerish outcome, but still humanoid.