Wilton House, The double cube room. Painting

This was the first painting that I made in a series of historic house interiors. When the Covid lock-down started I could not visit these places in person, so I painted them to keep myself busy and to cheer myself up. To imagine a life returned to normal. I have always loved stately homes and aspired to live in one. Wilton House, and especially the double Cube room are landmarks in the developing English style. The architect Inigo Jones was at the forefront of introducing the Palladian style to the English aristocracy, this is arguably his masterpiece. I wanted to convey the richness of the room, yet not loose it's coziness and warmth. I find that photographs sometimes fall short of conveying what it feels like to be in the place. The great advantage a painter has is the ability to edit, to leave things out, to dramatize the lighting, to focus on what is most important. My paintings are oil on canvas. Although I was taught old master traditional techniques I want to make more contemporary work. I have no interest in photo-realism. My paintings look like photographs when viewed form a distance but as the viewer gets closer it becomes apparent that the detail is merely implied. This, I believe, is how we experience the world, only focusing on a few details but believing that we have seen everything that there was to see. People say that my paintings do genuinely look better in the flesh than they do in photographs. They are also surprised that they are as big as they are. Taking photos of them and printing them in a smaller format more or less undoes the very thing that I have tried to achieve. It is possible to loose yourself in my art and imagine a different, supremely comfortable and sumptuous past existence. The paintings come framed in a white tray frame that gives them a contemporary feel, they fit equally well into a modern or a more traditional environment and provide a window onto another world.