A Common Thread
Autumn Wood near Chequers
1979 Oil on canvas
This painting links most closely to ‘Willow in Highbury’ of a few years later and was a key painting done during the period I spent in Aylesbury for my first medical house job. Out there I was away from everything, away from London from Ari, from medical school, from family. It was a time of intense focus and exploration as well as loneliness. I went off out into the beech woods around Chequers during the intense autumn leaf fall and then approaching winter in November.
This is one of the paintings I did then, out in the woods, trying to bring together everything I had worked for.
The theme is the precise delineation of structure through trees, with the winter like a kind of expression of precise but gentle and energetic thought, along with the seething colour of the leaves below ground in the bottom part. I had done many kind of images like this before, trying to link subterranean, energetic life with the above ground air, a sense always of trying to allow free flowing energy outwards, to link different parts of the structure. In this painting I remember the crucial thing was to find lines of energy transfer that could liberate the bottom and connect the halves of the painting. The key moment was the point where I found the solution of splitting the main central tree trunk image into two, from the initial version of it which was a single trunk, which looked stupid. This decision to split the trunk and allow an articulation of the relationship between the two trunks and thus to the other trunks in the forest was the mechanism for allowing the energy transfer. It linked with other work I did at this time using this kind of double image. It is a bit pat to say it, but I think it is probably right that I was working with singleness versus relatedness here and the solution to the release of this energy within relationships in the painting was a turning point. The rhythms of the painting also have some relationship to my discovery of Beethoven’s late string quartets at this time.
Landscape with Church (Church in Gascony)
1998 Acrylic on board 60 x 80 cm
House in Stia
2003 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 76 cm
Sunrise at Stia
2004 Acrylic on board
Garden and Camellia
2005 Oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm
Cursus eget nunc scelerisque viverra mauris in aliquam sem. Diam in arcu cursus euismod quis viverra nibh. Eget arcu dictum varius duis at consectetur. Duis ut diam quam nulla porttitor massa. Quisque non tellus orci ac. Nullam eget felis eget nunc. Vel orci porta non pulvinar neque.
Vase 1
2005 Pencil on paper
Vase 2
2005 Pencil on paper
Pelleas et Melisande in Sicily
2007 Acrylic on board 45 x 60 cm
I saw Debussy’s opera Pelleas et Melisande when I was quite young in a production at ENO and went when it was put on again at Covent Garden a few years ago. The opera opens with two figures lost in a forest. The prince, wandering in the forest away from the castle, and Melisande, enigmatic, wild, adrift in the wood, arriving from a past that is not specified, but understood as inconsolable. Their meeting is a tender evocation of confused sensitivity; she is terrified - “ne me touché pas” (don’t touch me) she repeats in the first amazing motif of Debussy’s score - “ne me touché pas”.
This limbo forest, with its texture of possibility and the drama and fate of meeting I wanted to echo in this painting done in a Sicilian olive grove.
Valley of the Gods
2007 Acrylic on canvas
Sicillian Garden
2009 Acrylic on board 45 x 60 cm
Forest in Noto Antica
2011 Pencil on paper
Anghiari – the town
2012 Acrylic on board Private Collection
Morning in Assisi
2013 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 40 cm
This is a sunrise painting - capturing the moment each morning from around 6.30 am when the first sun hit a particular spot on the grass outside our rented house.
Willow at the White House
2013 Oil on canvas Private Collection
Italian landscape for Andy
2014 Acrylic on board 30 x 60 cm
Growth and Form
2015 Acrylic on canvas 40 x 50 cm Private Collection
Olive Series 1
2015 Pencil on paper
Laura plays Bach
2016 Oil on canvas 120 x 90 cm
The cellist Laura Van Der Heijden played a house concert with us during her rehearsal period, played a Bach cello Suite, during which I did a series of drawings – which led to this painting.
Loss in Norway
2017 Oil on canvas 150 x 50 cm
This piece was composed during a walking trip into the Vestre Gausdal mountains in Norway with my friend Chris. It was June, and just in the period between snowmelt and the dark brown tundra of the Norwegian spring. The days are very long and we saw no other people for five days. During the walk I received a message from my mother’s nursing home that her health was deteriorating, and this sense of her immanent loss infused my time in the mountains. My mother died soon after my return and this painting done subsequently, combines the light of the mountains and her farewell.
Arnhem Tryptich 3
2018 Oil on canvas 76 x 91 cm
Arnhem Tryptych 2014-20
In 2014 we visited the Arnhem battlefield at Oosterbeck to visit a site of great significance to my father’s wartime; the mission he took on to cross German lines to link with the US allies at Nijmegan. After our return I had enough time to recount my trip to my father before his death in June 2014. The triptych, based on his Arnhem mission, allowed me to meditate on his lifetime journey as well as this experience, and to process his passing.