Is it me?

While my drawing style has settled quite well, it’s rare I challenge myself to go into new directions. An offhand comment to a friend that I hadn’t done a self portrait for ages meant the start of something new.

I most certainly didn’t want to paint in the style of my periodic xmas cards, which I always consider just to be drawing with paint. So it had to be a bit more abstract than I used to….and honest!

The inner core of the portrait is where I go when I meditate. I don’t sit in this slightly odd position, but the pose aims to show that I think. The all over blue was a conscious decision to take me out of realness, but I like to think it accidentally was linking to Celtic roots and the paint that warriors used before battle. 

When I sit on the banks of the Nene in Becket’s Park, I get a real sense of niceness that this river can be used to reach my birthplace. My origin and my adopted home seems like a circle completed. The grass and flowers represent the summer evenings within my mind, and often where I end up when within myself.

My enduring memory of hot summers as a child in Wales, are the mountains almost baked yellow in the dry heat, but the hedges and fields remaining green. At the top the old, old church of St Illtydd’s the end of many a walk.

St Michaels Mount is there showing the other side of my roots, and as I generally see it in the winter, the waves are high and white.

The stone ring, the waterfall and the green hill is the landscape of my soul. Not reachable by physical means, I find it sometimes in my dreams or my internal

wanderings. 

My earliest memories include me cuddling my teddy as a baby and unable to sleep under a full moon when seen through my window. The sense she was alive and watching me and not to be afraid of has never left me.

One winter’s night as a teenager I climbed the hill towards the old church. The winter was bitter, dry and windless and pitch black. I have no idea why I was out. As I reached the hill top the Milky Way was above my head. A huge band of millions of diamonds stretching across the sky I was entranced. Not seen before or since, the memory is a place to retreat to when restless and seeking peace.