Monoprint and collage.

"You Are the Frame"

The original idea of this comes from a letter my friend David Loft sent me in 1975 or 76. He was in Paris and he wrote something about the faces of people, and other things he was seeing, and he wrote ..."you are the frame". So that's the idea. When I did this I was working in a very free and experimental way. It was really lovely working like that. 

The background is a quickly done mono-print with some words in, not very legible. Then I made the faces and figure by first creating textured paper with thick acrylic brush strokes with white paint on cartridge paper. I painted the people with gouache on that textured paper, and cut them out. I glued them on to the monoprint. It is A3 size.

A chalk pastel picture.

This is an A3 picture done in chalk pastels. It was part of a project I did at college based on people in the streets of Cambridge. The pose of the woman comes from a real person who was sitting on a bench looking lovely, so I asked her if she would mind me taking a picture of her. She didn't mind, but her whole demeanour changed when she knew I was taking her photo, she looked quite stiff and shy.

Anyway, she was wearing a pale blue jacket, so that changed. And the odd figure beside her is just imagined by me. And the huge flowers.

Wonky drawing.

This is not totally invented, but nearly. It just has one small link with the real world, which is that I was thinking of my friend Marion's kitchen when I drew this. She is an architect and designed her own house. The kitchen has nice, squarish proportions and lots of drawers, and a big table. And some of the walls in her house are painted a warm, terracotta-ish orange. Neither of these women is Marion, though. They are just strange people I drew out of nowhere. 

The medium is Caran d'Ache crayons and obviously it was done very quickly. The chair is really a bit of a problem - it's not that I can't draw chairs, either. I don't know what I was doing. But there is still something I like about this picture. There is a kind of intense drama about the two characters.

I did this in about 2002. I don't think it has a title.

A Dream

It is a pity this is in black & white - it's a charcoal drawing - because if it had a title it would be "The Blue Ring". It's about a dream I had where I was walking along the road in our village one evening, and a blue ring of light appeared above my head.

The ring of light somehow lifted me up into the sky with it, high up above the rooftops of the village. It wasn't frightening. I felt completely safe. The ring then floated me far away across many miles of dark forests. All was dark and murky, no colours.

Then, eventually, I floated beyond the dark forests and then down below me I could see a whole landscape laid out, in daylight, with green hills and fields, and trees in bright leaf.

After a while, I saw a cafe with tables and chairs outside in a meadow. There was only one person sitting there, and it was my father. In real life, he had died a few years before I had that dream.

I floated down to sit with him. I held on to him and asked him if he had been stressed when he died, and he told me that no, he hadn't been. I was aware of the warm sun and the fresh air, it was like an early spring day. There were no other people in that landscape, just me and my Dad.