Crackle. So here is the last one for the year. It's called Crackle because it crackles with energy, all of the strokes made with either knife or credit card and fast decisvie movements. I've included wip pictures of this so that you can see the process :

As you can see the final painting is really quite different.

I wish you all a very Happy New Year, and hope that 2017 will be a lot better for everyone.

Hi everyone, thanks for visiting ? .To help celebrate 20 years of painting I'm offering all of my paintings at 20% discount from now until the end of Dec.

Have a look at  my work

Please message me via the contact form me if you there's anything you'd like to ask.

The music and video are both by Andrew. Thanks darling

I love working with this limited palette - it makes me think of caramels - and I looove caramels, toffee, sauce or creme

yum. Since I've given up smoking caramels are playing a larger part in my life :)

40 by 50 cms, acrylic and charcoal on deep edged canvas

This is quite a curvy painting for me. It's odd actually but as I was drawing the brush across the canvas for one of the first lines,

I had a really strong flashback of creating the same curve in a life drawing class which I'd taken a few years ago. Just goes to show

that nothing is really forgotten.

I've also mananged to put on a couple of kilos since the op. - hurray - so I'm feeling a little curvier myself ha ha

A companion piece to the previous work - 20 by 30cms on paper.The first was untitled, but I've gone with

gold for now for this one

Todays little offering, and I do mean little only -  20 by 30cm on paper. Acrylic and charcoal, limited palette.

A bit more sombre than usual, reflecting my mood I suppose. It calmed me whilst painting it and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Can't think of a name - ideas welcome

Should she or shouldn't she.

This painting followed a visit to the hairdresser where we chatted about the fact that she wanted to colour her hair

but couldn't decide which colour. After going through the spectrum :) she decided on lilac

I've been out and about in my adopted city Valletta, after spending a couple of months after the surgery at home

it's been lovely to see something other than my own four walls. I visited the Museum of Archaeology looking for inspiration  and thought I'd share a couple of photos with you

I'd painted and posted this before I went into hospital. Having looked at it again recently I realised

that I'd been a bit hasty as it wasn't really what I wanted. It seemed unfinished and without the usual love and attention

that I give to my work. It was obvious that I was totally distracted and should have just left it until I came home again.

So anyway a few days ago I got it out and worked on it some more and now I'm satisfied. There's a much better

balance of colour and the fact that it's had quite a lot of TLC is evident to me. So now I can let it go. It's acrylic on 80 by 80cm

deep edged canvas.

There was a local call to artists in my adopted city, Valletta recently which wanted paintings with a retro feel.

It got me thinking of music, so I loaded my brain with 70's music and prepped a canvas.

I had a great time dancing around to songs from The Kinks, Stones, Gladys Knight, Elton John

and the wonderful Debbie Harry. There were some really fab songs in the 70's and some really

really terrible ones. Listening and looking at music vids the patterns and colours are really exuberant,

which is what I wanted to show in this piece.

This is the second of these cooler climes paintings. The format here is 70 by 50cms rather than square, which made me think about things a little differently  The same limited palette was used.

Recently the  humidity in my studio was up around 90%  and above, using the fan was really irritating, paint drying too quickly and my hair in my eyes so using this cool palette helped :)

Love this time of the year mainly cos my lilies start to bloom, they're really beautiful and smell absolutely gorgeous.