More Painters Painting

Another painting of painters painting. How many artists can you identify? I looked up a list of the most famous artists of the last century and for some reason there are a lot of Americans, and most of them are white males, including Pollock doing one of his drip paintings. But there's also Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo, Basquiat and Chris Offili. And there's also Damien Hirst watching one of his assistants paint a spot painting for him. He has a studio about a mile from mine where his work is manufactured. Can't imagine ever employing an assistants to paint my paintings but you never know...

Cages of Freedom

This is a painting I'm donating to the art auction for Amnesty in October. I've always been interested in optical illusions so here I'm combining that with a few figures from the crowd paintings. As with all my work it expresses an ambivalence towards notions of 'freedom'.

Running to the Sun

Here's a new painting for everyone off on their summer holidays and especially those VolksFolk driving off in search of the sun in their vans and beetles. I've even included Herbie The Love Bug (his number just happens to be the same age as the artist).

Waving Axes

Two new fans added to the painting of England supporters - the coalition chums Nick and Dave waving their axes. Just a reminder that even if we win the World Cup I'm not sure the rest will have much to cheer about with so many cuts round the corner.

Finished working on the allotments this week. Gardening is not my strong point but this one seemed to grow all right. I've been thinking about it for over a year, a painting with no people in it, just for a change. Apart from the scarecrow. Anyway, the earth is very red, like it is in Herefordshire, which contrasts well with the artificial greens, and The Lion Gallery have snapped it up to exhibit next week in Leominster.

Hawthorn Gallery

The Hawthorn Gallery have just framed up these two paintings. It's not easy to choose frames for my busy images but these are really smart - plain, deep, chunky - and neatly offsetting colours from within the pictures. I recommend all my customers do something similar. http://www.thehawthorngallery.co.uk/

England fans again

And here's a detail. A few of the fans are wearing unlikely gear like viking helmets with red crosses on, or traditional St George's bikinis. With only 3 weeks until kick off I am now quickly jumping on the world cup bandwagon to produce some merchandise.