It’s that time of year again – the time when we feel the need to suddenly find empathy with our fellow planet travellers when usually we do our best to ignore them. My credit card has been cancelled by my bank because some local fraudster has got hold of the details and has been busy booking foreign air trips and North African hotel stays without actually feeling the need to invite me, the bastard. So we’ve stocked up on red wine and the time away from the nine to five mental grind at the hospital has been spent (between the obligatory family visits) painting. And I think I can say that at last I feel I’m finally getting somewhere. This may prove to be the famous last words before the creative juices go the way of the desiccated turkey left-overs, and this entry might be the excessive results of too many paintings sent on their way with one or two, or three… bottles of Merlot.
I gave up painting abstracts in 1996 because the joy had gone out of the painting of them; I was almost painting to order. I had always wanted to paint people, it seemed the natural extension from drawing them – which had never been a problem – but I wanted to paint them in a certain way. I think now I am getting towards that initial idea of how I wanted my work to start looking, after ten years. Bloody hell – that’s some wait. I’ll see what happens…

detail of painting from 2006

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