Digital Paintings

During a recent visit to Whitby Abbey we were blessed with early morning sunlight filtered through swirling mist, together with The Abbey’s soft reflection in the pond.

After taking this photograph, I layered it into Procreate and painted in the crows, the boat and the water lilies. I decided to lose the original colours and recreate a ‘vintage’ print in sepia tones, which I think really adds atmosphere.

Known for its narrow, winding streets and traditional red-roofed cottages, Staithes is a small fishing village located on the beautiful North Yorkshire coast. With stunning views from both inside and above the village we usually wander for hours, taking dozens of photos and revelling in the beautiful surroundings. It is most definitely one of our favourite places to be.

Swan Lake is a classic, treasured ballet which tells the story of prince Siegfried and Odette, the latter a beautiful princess transformed into a swan by a wicked sorcerer’s curse.

After pledging his undying love and fidelity to Odette (which will lift the curse from Odette once they are married), Siegfried is bewitched by the Black Swan, Odile (the sorcerer’s daughter in disguise). Blinded by enchantment, he succumbs to Odile, thus abandoning his love for Odette by unwittingly accepting her as his bride.

Distraught, Odette tells her swan sisters that Siegfried did not keep his vow of love. They all return to the lake as a storm begins to break and Siegfried desperately begs her for forgiveness. She refuses and attempts to break away but he snatches the crown from her head and throws it in the lake, saying, “Willing or unwilling, you will always remain with me!” “What have you done? I am dying!”, Odette replies, as she falls into his arms. The lake rises from the storm quickly and drowns them both.

Watching Swan Lake is like stepping into a wild dream full of enchantment, impossibilities and fantasies. The two heroes arouse the passions of the audience as they experience both romance and the deepest grief, which ends firstly in tears and, ultimately, in death.

My image here, of course, features the lead ballerina, who traditionally takes on the roles of both Odette and Odile. Imagine the conflicting emotions she experiences as she dances her way through the ballet, together with the physical exhaustion caused by executing countless Développés and muscle-burning Fouettés.

And members of the audience, moved by the emotional landscape of the music, will surely experience a profound sadness as the story unfolds. Completely captured by the performance, there will be moments when they identify deeply with Odette and Siegfried. For at some time in their lives they, too, will have danced their way to the end of love; sunk beneath heavy waters, “into the deep of the great dark world …”

“A lone gray bird,

Dim-dipping, far-flying,

Alone in the shadows and grandeur’s and tumults Of night and the sea And the stars and storms.”

From, ‘From the Shore’

By Carl Sandburg

I had a good idea what I wanted to create with this piece and created a rough sketch quite some time ago.

Then, purely by chance I came across a poem by Gillian Clarke called ‘Woman’s Work’, which also immediately reminded me of one of my favourite Kate Bush songs, ‘This woman’s work’, which never fails to grab my soul each time I listen to it.

Here is the first verse of Gillian’s wonderful poem:

‘𝑾𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒏’𝒔 𝑾𝒐𝒓𝒌’

Inspired by the poem ‘Woman’s Work’’ by Gillian Clarke.

This is the first verse:

“August Sunday morning,
and I’m casting for words,
Wandering the garden sipping their poems, leaving cups of them here and there in the grass where the washing steams in the silence after the hay-days and the birdsong months.”

This piece was inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem, ‘Her breast was fit for pearls’, which seems to be about a love that dare not speak its name. Frustration, angst and never-everness blaze from the poet’s lines.

And so I think of Dickinson’s troubled relationship with her once best friend and then sister-in-law Susan Dickinson ~ a thinly veiled theme that runs through several more of her poems.

Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a “Diver.”
Her brow is fit for thrones –
But I had not a crest.

Her heart is fit for home—
I—a Sparrow—build there
Sweet of twigs and twine
My perennial nest.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Brontë museum in Haworth and I took a couple of iPhone photos of the bronze sculpture of the three Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Initially housed at Leeds City Art Gallery, this captivating piece was created by the sculptor Jocelyn Horner in 1950.

Having lived on the edge of Brontë Country for sixteen years now I’ve developed both a love and a fascination for The Sisters and their works. I’ve already created several images inspired by them and their novels so I thought I would use the statue as a starting point for a new, digital painting.

Once I began the work I noticed that Anne seemed to be holding something in her hand but I couldn’t make out what it was. Intrigued, I contacted the staff at The Brontë Parsonage Museum, who were keen to help me. It transpires that Anne is actually holding a dead bird, which reportedly relates to her sister Emily’s poem, ‘No coward soul is mine’.

In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker concludes, “there is not room for Death”, intimating that even death itself cannot truly destroy someone, for their “Being” and “Breath” will always remain alive, captured within the infinite immortality of the divine.

Whilst the statue is a rather raw and rugged piece that captures the bleakness of the moors that surrounded them, I’ve chosen to create a more mellow, even dreamlike portrayal of The Sisters ~ reminiscent perhaps of their imaginary childhood world of Gondal, which inspired many of their later poems and novels.

A painting inspired by Emily Brontë’s short poem. It was created by taking my original iPhone photograph and layering it together with my painting of The Brontë Sisters in Procreate.

“Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.”

A photograph overpainted in Procreate.

“I Am Vertical”, which was published posthumously by her husband Ted Hughes, is one of Sylvia Plath’s later confessional poems.

Throughout this poem there is continual comparison between the poet and natural objects that carries an underlying motif of death; one of the commonest themes of Plath’s poetry. Written two years before she died in 1963, this poem in particular provides insight into her complex psyche and her almost non-existent self-worth.

Plath’s chosen title, “I am vertical,” begins the poem and is immediately followed by, “But I would rather be horizontal,” which quickly confirms her unhappiness and addresses her feelings of inadequacy and low self esteem.

“Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,” ~ begins the second stanza, bringing the narrative into the present moment ~ “The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors. I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.”

This fact is painful to the poet and leads her to believe that she would be better off “finally” dead. Her body would return to the earth and help sustain the world, just as the plants do.

Throughout her poem, the mood is dark, reinforced by the nighttime setting, a sky full of watching (helpless) stars and the eerie personification of the trees and plants. Yet, ironically perhaps, Plath’s poem oozes beauty throughout and reflects the final chiastic lines of Keats’ poem, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Keats suggests that beauty, in its purest form, holds an inherent truth that surpasses the limits of human understanding. Rather than splitting these two virtues and analysing them separately, fusing them together removes the problematic jousting of subject and object by offering up an intersubjective interpretation: that beauty (as an impact upon our senses) transcends any intellectual analysis and therefore cannot be contested. ‘Beauty is Truth’, in that the two are not only connected but inseparable.

If only Plath had realised that the beauty of her poetry reflected the truth of the beauty within her self.

Inspired by Plath’s poem, my image attempts to illustrate the connections between Plath herself and the natural world and, ultimately, the beauty born out of that relationship.

“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium”, begins Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. It is a work of speculative fiction set in a near-future North America in a totalitarian Christian theocracy, which has overthrown the United States government.

It was my recent re-reading of ‘Handmaid’ that spawned this image and, in particular, her final line: “And so I step up, into the darkness within.’ If you haven’t yet read the book I strongly recommend that you do ~ it’s such an enthralling and thought-provoking tale.

A few months ago @christineosobczak ~ one of my favourite artists whose work I truly admire ~ posted up an image of a pair of hands as ‘abandoned’, stating that although she’d tried so hard, “this image cannot come to a resolution.”

Driven only by a thought that I didn’t want all her hard work to result in nothing, I began to create a portrait, determined to weave in at least a part of those hands. Though my portrait was of an anonymous woman I wanted, somehow, to acknowledge the driving forces of Christine’s art: our connection to the stars, an acknowledgment of the Spiritual and an obvious nod to the colour red.

Huge thanks to Christine for giving her permission to post what, in essence, is a collaboration between the two of us 🙏🏼

An image inspired by the incredible artwork from Aurora’s album, “All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend” and a poem by Eleanor Kendrick.

“moth,
you tint and tut and thub and thud again,
again, against the blot-strong glass, you ram
and butt your blunt flat head, and bleed mothblood,
and pulp yourself to death – for nothing
but a humming siren, pulsing
fools-gold lovebeams at the night.”

𝐹𝑟𝑜𝑚 ‘𝑀𝑜𝑡ℎ’ 𝑏𝑦 𝐸𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑜𝑟 𝐾𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑘

The inspiration behind this piece of art, is the cover photo of Aurora’s album entitled, ‘All my demons greeting me as a friend’. The artwork, called ‘Cocoon’, is an original photograph taken by Bent René Synnevåg.

Whilst listening to this song, the lyrics conjure up a transformative, or liminal, space: a space in-between ‘what was’ & ‘what is now’, from which insight emerges &, paradoxically, we are liberated by the death of how we used to be & the emergence of ‘something new’ that rises within us.

In creating ‘Unwrapping’ there were spots of time when I slid into what Martin Buber describes as ‘I-Thou’ moments … when the technicalities of the creative process ceased & the soul took over. That is when the image began to take on shape & meaning … when each ‘brush stroke’ became a lyric or a musical note & I drifted back to my own childhood. That is when this particular piece of art began to breathe.

Created in October last year, this image was inspired initially by the colours of the season. As I fell deeper into the piece, I recalled the song ‘October’ by U2 from the album, also entitled October, in particular the lines:

‘October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on
And on’

And then I remembered an incredibly beautiful poem written by one of my favourite poets:

‘When morning comes, the sun, ardent
covers the trees in gold, you walk

towards me,
out of the season, out of the light love reasons.’

From ‘Love’, by Carol Ann Duffy

No further explanations needed …

Inspired by a poem with the same title by Carl Sandburg

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely
and you take it deep take it dark
and take it with a lonely winding
and when the winding gets too lonely
then may come the windflowers
and the breath of wind over many flowers
winding its way out of many lonely flowers
waiting in rainleaf whispers
waiting in dry stalks of noon
wanting in a music of windbreaths
so you can take love as it comes keening
as it comes with a voice and a face
and you make a talk of it
talking to yourself a talk worth keeping
and you put it away for a keen keeping
and you find it to be a hoarding
and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded
like a book read over and over again
like one book being a long row of books
like leaves of windflowers bending low
and bending to be never broken

Drawing on a Finnish myth in her book of short stories, ‘Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of shapeshifting women’, Sharon Blackie brings to life women’s remarkable ability to transform themselves in the face of extreme hardship and tragedy. In the story ‘Foxfire’, she becomes transfixed by a wild fox, who leads her deeper and deeper into the woods ~ seducing her with her feral lifestyle.

“She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart”, writes Blackie. “I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land. Together, we’d create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do – racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora’s glow. Revontulet, we call it: foxfire.”

Looking beyond the myth, the author describes how, wild and uncontainable, the fox leads her to her own, “wild-pawed path”, towards the resolution of her grief and the reclamation of her womanhood.

As so often happens this piece gradually became something I didn’t quite expect. I began with the bare bones of an image created some years ago & the idea of introducing an apple (that strongly suggests pregnancy in this image) began to materialise. This ‘Big Apple’, of course, became a very large metaphor for New York, which triggers thoughts of the Sinatra classic … more than enough to capture both my mind & emotions, the latter guiding me through right to the end of this piece.

I love New York. I’ve only visited this might City once back in 2013 but I can easily recall feeling staggered & completely overwhelmed during the taxi ride to my hotel near the Docklands. In this image the icons are still there: the Apple, the Statue of Liberty … but the cracks are showing, there is crumbling, there is decay. The woman in this piece still wears her Apple earrings with pride but her country, to me, feels to be in a state of pregnancy right now: a period of time tinged with uncertainty where the outcome is never guaranteed.

Also known as ‘The City that Never Sleeps’, I wanted to incorporate this fact into the image as a sort of False counter: the lights that never go out, the razzmatazz, the perpetual motion ~ yet beneath all this, not too far from the surface, are the lives lived by the people & their shadows. I sense their collective strength ~ yet I sense their weariness too, their anxieties, their frustrations, their fears. In analytic terms New York becomes a projection: a facade or False Self that glosses over a state of trepidation. Will the Apple ripen or rot? And should the pregnancy go full term, what does the future hold for any newly born infant in New York; the whole of The United States; The World?

This piece was inspired by the true story of Sadako Sasaki. Diagnosed with leukemia from the radiation fallout in Hiroshima, eight-year-old Sadako’s friend told her to fold origami paper cranes (orizuru). She was inspired to do so by the Japanese legend that one who created a thousand origami cranes would be granted a wish. Her wish was simply to live through her disease & become an accomplished runner.

Sadly, despite having folded well over one thousand paper cranes, she died on the morning of October 25, 1955. In 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Park. At the foot of the statue is a plaque that reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace on Earth.”

This piece was inspired by Edwina Sandy’s 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎, a statue of a female Christ created in 1974 specifically for the United Nations Decade for Women. Her statue, cast in bronze, displays the battered body of a naked, crucified woman with a crown of thorns upon her head.

I thought long & hard before making the decision to create &, in particular, go public with this piece. I would be a fool if I thought some people wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, perhaps even angry, on viewing it. The last thing I ever want to do with my art is upset people ~ but, in every piece I make, I do try to paint potential stories within it: stories that might surface from within the viewer as they, hopefully, begin to connect with it.

As you can probably imagine, Sandy’s 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 generated a storm of controversy when it was unveiled in The Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Detractors saw the statue as a ‘travesty against historical and doctrinal truth’ and it was removed from the cathedral eleven days later.

According to Elisabeth Vasko, Sandy’s statue calls attention to the ways in which both Christianity and society at large have muted the subjectivity of women by objectifying their bodies. 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎’s broken body, she explains, gives voice to ways in which the bodies of women have been abandoned and alienated from the Body of Christ (Vasko 2012).

One woman, after viewing the statue, wrote: “When many of us see the 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 we see all the women we have known and loved and the women we have not known and yet love, shamed and cursed, tortured, raped, made the object of lust, and in sadomasochistic pornography hung on crosses.”

In light of abstract conversations about the beauty of The Cross, the sculpture foregrounds the long history of violence against women in a way that is difficult to ignore. 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 visually calls into question “the ways in which the female body has been eroticized, suffering and self-sacrificial love valorized, and the maleness of Christ idolatrized within Christendom.” (Brooks Thistlethethwaite, 1991).

The question that 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 continues to raise is whether the bodies of women can serve as symbols of salvation and of divine beauty. But why should they not? Stories need to be retold without the oppressive logic of a patriarchal society, explains Hélène Cixous. And so too art. 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 exposes the patriarchal dimensions of such constructions and calls for a new vision of aesthetics ~ one that presents women’s experiences of suffering and salvation. This was my starting place: to do my utmost to create a feminist (as opposed to female) perspective on my own interpretation of the suffering described to me by hundreds of women during my lengthy clinical practice as a psychotherapist.

An impromptu stroll in the rain along the Skipton canal offered up this beautiful swan, idling beneath the garden wall of Mill Bridge Gallery. The muted reflections of a multitude of pink flowers was an added bonus

‘I’m having such a good time
I’m having a ball
Don’t stop me now
If you wanna have a good time, just give me a call.’

The woman in this piece began life as a photograph of my wife, whilst Freddie began life as someone I photographed a while ago. As for the faces at the open window … you may just recognise a few of them.