Sometimes a drift of flowers in sunlight can feel like a glimpse of paradise. In this post, I explore my ongoing fascination with flowers, colour, and light through a series of recent paintings and drawings. Discover the experiments, breakthroughs, and frustrations behind the work, and see how I'm exploring ways to create paintings that capture not just the appearance of flowers, but the joy and wonder they inspire.

Over the cold winter months, I’ve been exploring mixed media botanical drawing as a way to capture the vibrant forms of garden flowers. Using a combination of charcoal, coloured pastels, ink washes, and collage, I’ve been able to carve out delicate flower shapes while keeping a sense of depth and context in the background. This approach allows me to study each bloom closely and experiment with colour, light, and texture in ways that traditional methods sometimes can’t.

I spent five days in Ullapool exploring the Scottish landscape, sketching rivers, hills, and harbours. Using charcoal, pastel, and ink, I created imaginative paintings that pushed me out of my comfort zone. Messy, challenging, and full of discoveries — just the way I love it!

My Day 4 drawing in charcoal, black ink and pastel A couple of weeks ago, I attended a lovely 4 day art course at Paintbox School of Art in Cockenzie near Edinburgh. The tutor was the lovely Kittie Jones whose work I have seen and admired for a long time. I do love these small scale art education enterprises which seem to offer a great learning experience for a fraction of the cost of an art degree. I used to run Horsley Printmakers which held printmaking courses for many yea

Acrylic Painting on wood panel with water-soluble crayons (in progress) Funny title, eh? Let me explain: I've been using a very limited palette in my recent mixed-media paintings. To help me remember, I've come up with this phrase: Lemon = Lemon! (no prizes there!) Meringue = Magenta (my paint tube is Quinachridone Violet but I think of it as magenta) Pie = Payne's Grey (an indispensible alternative to black - it's softer with more blue in it) With = White Cream = Cyan, a coo

These mixed-media paintings were made during a five day "Walking and Drawing" course in North Yorkshire with Debbie Loane of Lund Studios. We travelled to some marvellous locations and enjoyed working out of doors - no easels, just on the ground on long pieces of paper folded into a concertina. The shape really suited the wide panorama views of the moors and valleys we were seeing. The fields were a lovely fresh green, with the distinctive dark lines of dry stone walls runnin

I was delighted to have my art work chosen for the lead feature of a brand new local quality magazine "Tyne Valley Living". Well k