Rooms
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Art Deco IV
Slightly different from my previous Art Deco designs, this is a painting of the interior of a former house – now the van Buuren Museum – in Brussels. The house is full of some wonderful period art, but what particularly caught my eye during our recent visit was the light in the stairwell. Now, I…
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Classical Ambience
I recently attended a lunch at Hylands House near Chelmsford in Essex. Apart from the enjoying the event itself, I was rather curious to see the interior of a house that I first new as a near ruin when I was a child, but which is now returned to something close to what I presume…
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An Audience
As I spend more time wrestling with my watercolour paints, I have realised that as well as applying ever more colour to the paper it is also possible to remove paint from the surface to lighten an area. This scene was created to experiment with ways of removing paint from certain places to create the…
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Two Doors
These doors don’t really exist. This image popped into my head whilst I was making a rather obvious choice between two alternatives. Now I suppose that contrasting a welcoming light beyond an open door with a locked door guarding an apparently dark room is a rather hackneyed image, but it summed up my thoughts at…
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View from Chartwell
Chartwell was the family home of Winston Churchill, who as well as being a renowned wartime leader was also a prodigious artist – indeed many of his paintings are on display at the house and in various outbuildings in the grounds. I think that here I have managed to pick a view from a window…
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Stained Glass – Christ Church
A while ago we showed some American friends around Oxford. Their reaction to all the old buildings was of course quite predictable, but what I hadn’t expected was that their awe would also make me appreciate again buildings that had become all too familiar. One of these, the cathedral in Christ Church, was an oasis…
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Stained Glass – Sagrada Familia
I can’t quite decide whether this painting is okay or not! On the one hand it definitely doesn’t capture the vibrant colours in the glass that my eyes saw at the time and that my camera captured for posterity. On the other hand, it is quite a pleasant picture to look at, and it does…
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Summerhouse & Shelter
I have already commented on the bad weather we had during our recent visit to Ichi-Coo Park. Early that afternoon we experienced a really heavy downpour, so I took refuge in a summerhouse which was the driest place I could find, and started drawing on the only “waterproof” pad that I had – my iPad!…
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Chair, Pouffe and Plant
Many of my recent watercolour paintings have actually been a combination of watercolour and pen. So I decided to try a simple watercolour-only painting, and these three objects were right in front of me at the time! As you will be able to see, some aspects of this painting worked out well, others less so.…
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Canons Ashby – Book Room
Canons Ashby was a bit of a find. We were looking for a place to stop for lunch on a journey up north that wasn’t a motorway service station, and so decided to see what the National Trust had to offer. The manor house at Canons Ashby was perfect – conveniently situated and a haven…
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Lisu Lodge, Mae Taeng – Balcony Sketch
In Thailand we were lucky enough to spend a few nights in an amazing hill tribe village. The buildings were to all appearances very traditional, but also very comfortable and not at all lacking in mod-cons, so perhaps they were more “traditional” than traditional. Anyway, the bamboo building we were staying in had a large…
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Drawing Room
This scene of calm was the room where we rested after one of our days walking a section of Offa’s Dyke. There is a great contrast between the light and dark areas in this scene, which is always an interesting challenge to achieve with only a black pen. The walk was a challenge too of…
Doodling ... 