Zoo Painting

I was lucky to have a grandfather who introduced me to art. He showed me the landscapes of Constable and of Turner and I liked them well enough, but what really fascinated me was a picture by Bruegel of two monkeys on a window ledge: of their predicament—they were captive, and of the freedom beyond the window that they could see but not share. Bruegel’s unsettling pictures have had a deep impact upon me ever since. Goya was another early revelation. Rummaging on bookshelves, I also discovered gentler insights into the human condition brilliantly imparted in a few lines by illustrators Jules Feiffer and Tove Jansson. These childhood inspirations have stayed with me and until recently almost all of my paintings and illustrations have had humans or anthropomorphic animals at their centre. Then, in 2020, I tried painting a landscape—and loved it. Since that time, most of my paintings have been landscapes, although I still sometimes paint and draw in my earlier style. I started painting landscapes after gaining a new awareness of the natural world. In 2017 arthritis stopped me from running, so I went walking instead, and found that I was beginning to sense my surroundings at a new level. Places I had ran over for years seemed new. Sunlight and shade, reflections, stillness and movement, the venules of leaves, combined to reveal the intense and intoxicating beauty of nature. The collective genius with which the human points and lines created down the centuries, the hedgerows, churches and cairns, had been woven into the countryside became a source of wonder. Place names began to resonate as I discovered more of the stories behind them. Through landscape painting I try and express something of this beauty, wonder and history. Also, I am experimenting with AI.