Recent work 2018-21
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Exploration for Aqua fun - Water falls - Mixed media 2021
Splashing and laughter in the water park give way to other places and events.
Night-lifers caught in the depths.
Lovers drawn down through the glass to a cold glistering tide.
How does it end?
River Crescent Estuary Punk - Acrylic on canvas 2019
Echoing the flow back to the city across the estuary. Open water; monumental structures; rivuleted mud banks.
Traffic lined out to the horizon. Foreboding portals, throughways and canopies.
Sunlit courtyards and distant views in affirmation. Gold-violet iris in outlying churchyard.
Sculpted vehicles and water reconfiguring.
Flash of punk overarching all.
(Extended realism paintings pictures images)
Cosmic Control Croughton - Pencil on paper 2018
Girl visits expat Australian friends at high-tech chapel conversion in rural Northants.
Three kinds of weather and plenty of street furniture.
Snags a bollard to her surprise.
Exploration for Push or Pull - Mixed media with objet trouvé 2019
A two panel composition inspired by extracts from T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land”: a liaison in lines 215-248 of “The Fire Sermon”, and Eliot's Shakespearean citation for line 77 in “A Game of Chess”.
Cleopatra meeting Antony from her barge becomes a fantasy for “the typist” as she awaits her own lover. Man-woman Tiresias and “young man carbuncular” look on from beyond the lower frame edge. Influential people and places interweave across the scenes.
The lower panel blends Eliot’s home on Locust Street in St Louis with the Eads Bridge over his “big river” Mississippi, destination of childhood walks with an Irish nanny. The poet’s wives Vivienne and Valerie appear on their own English waterfronts in Bury and Leeds respectively.
From an upper room at the family home in the top panel, Eliot’s mother Charlotte echoes the "burnished throne" scene of Eliot’s poem. To the left of Cleopatra stands his university mentor the British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic Bertrand Russell. Kneeling right, watching a river boat fire canon over the water to raise the drowned, is the poet’s literary hero Huckleberry Finn.
The picture’s title ponders a “Waste Land” state of mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein, another of Russell's students, made push or pull decisions key to navigating life’s closed doors.
For a woman of fame (upper right) born poor at Locust Ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, neighbouring Eliot’s Missouri, divine dialogue guides that choice: “…sit your pretty little ass down because we have to deal with some stuff” (Dolly Parton, 2014).
(The Waste Land paintings pictures images)