Thanksgiving
I’m thankful for: My three kids, my home here in California, my family in England. My friends. Painting. Having such an extraordinary job. Yoga. Today I’m thankful that I’ve almost finished the skulls. I worked this morning and for a short time this afternoon, managing to get half way down the second of the two complete skulls, leaving me two half [...]

Traveler sketched, skulls moving
I’ve loosely sketched the traveler onto the panel to see how he looks in a very rough form at the actual size. It was enjoyable drawing at this scale, although I had to alter several things to become satisfied with the composition. I’m not entirely convinced that this is the way the piece will end [...]

Golden Section
I like to use the golden section as a compositional tool, just as the great artists of the renaissance did long ago, so it will come as no surprise that I’ve been working out how the Traveling Man painting will be arranged on the canvas. When I’m in the preparation phase of painting I’ll spend [...]

Fool’s journey
I’ve sketched a new version of the Traveling Man painting, based on a path that is receding from the picture plane over a hilltop, so that the landscape is low in the composition, and allowing a valley view that needn’t impose too much upon the dawn sky. I want to put a pair of pillar [...]

Palette knives
That dawn sky on Thursday of last week had a huge impact upon my thinking about how the Traveling Man painting will work. I had thought that the composition would be dominated by the road winding through a landscape, with fields and trees filling the majority of the canvas, but that sky was so extraordinarily [...]