Inspired by Christmas!

do not be afraid

waterbased media on NOT (medium grain) watercolour paper

36 x 48 cm

SOLD

my true love sent to me
(study for the pear tree)

watercolour on HP (hot-pressed/smooth) watercolour paper

12 x 9 inches

Finally, a glimpse of some other stuff I`ve been doing. 

"My true love sent to me" is really just a quick preliminary version of a piece I`d like to do in mixed media on medium-sized box canvas, but I kind of like it as a piece in its own right, for the simplicity and the colours.  I seem to like the whole "Partridge in a pear tree" saga as some of you might have already seen in "The 1st day of Christmas", in an earlier post.  

"Do not be afraid" is a kind of Northern-Irish take on "shepherds feeding their flocks by night", with a young woman out walking her dog in a typical County Antrim landscape, with a view of the famous landmark hill, Slemish, err mountain, to folks here!  Originally, it had a 3rd angel - perhaps you might see a ghost  of her somewhere!! but it unbalanced the whole composition; I`m much happier with the diagonals and triangle formation that it`s now got.  To eliminate her, I painted over the sky with acrylic and then added subsequent layers of watercolour wet into wet and wet into dry, and got a really interesting texture as a  result.  

For whatever reason, this painting reminds me so much of one of my favourite books as a child, "The wizard of Oz."  I read it umpteen times, and seemed to watch Judy Garland sing her heart out nearly every Christmas.  I find it uncanny that the figure with her dog resembles Dorothy and Toto without that ever being my intention.  Several people have commented on my style as being dream-like, dreamscapes or whatever.  I`ve always viewed them as landscapes which embrace the imaginary with the experienced and the then with the now.  It`s always very interesting to discover how different people interpret something so personal to me.