Self portrait, snail shell

I used to have a neighbour who would paint numbers on the backs of snails, to catalogue them, and see if they would return. This did me no favours when they used to cross over to my garden and eat my sunflowers. Even more annoying when I used to find number 86, and wondered where the other 85 were! Anyhow, I was talking about this recently with someone close to me. And the conversation went on to my pet tortoise Colin. We were joking about what to paint on Colins shell, and we thought a self portrait would be funny. As that would be mean to Colin, a snail shell (empty, for now), was the next best thing. Quite tricky to paint though, as its a lot smaller in scale to what I'm used to. A fiddly self portrait.

Commissions aplenty

Oops, been gone for some time. And keep forgetting to keep the blog uptodate. Well here goes. Been very busy with commissions lately, which is always a good thing. Although now I'm a little snowed under. Just finished this one of Newcastles three main bridges. And I'm just about to finish two paintings of the River Tyne, one Upriver, the other Downriver. Should crack on. The sooner the commission backlog is out of the way, then I can crack on with some more abstract work.