The warm weather this month seems to have created a flurry of activity and four new paintings have been completed in a very short space of time. The heat has also speeded up the drying process with the oil paint as two of my works were thickly and quickly painted – the David Gilmour and Mick Jagger portraits.
I chose Dave Gilmour as Pink Floyd have always been one of my favourite bands and also because he was influential in launching Kate Bush’s career and came to see and hear her at the family home which is close to where we live in Welling. Much of the band’s music has played an important in my life over the last thirty or so years too.
I was a contemporary of Mick Jagger at Dartford Grammar School and, although a year older than me, I often saw him in school and on the buses outside lesson time. Strangely though, our paths never crossed again even though I spent nearly eighteen years in the music business and went to many events which he could have attended. In 2010 I had an exhibition with my daughter Trudi at my old school in what is now known as the Mick Jagger Centre foyer.
Earlier, and before I did these two portraits, I saw the 2014 BP Awards at the National Portrait Gallery and this year the standard was very high with some superb young artistic talent on view. I guess this visit provided further impetus for my musical portraits and perhaps one day I can produce something worthy of submission to this event. I might even leave them for a while and look again later to see if this loose style might be acceptable to enter the National Portrait Awards or another appropriate annual event.
A couple of landscapes have also been finished and one, a fairly traditional view of Kynance Cove in Cornwall, is shown below and will be added later to the Landscapes Gallery. Recently I have turned again to the example set by two English artists, John Piper and Kurt Jackson, whose landscapes of Cornwall are wonderfully evocative and very powerful. As a child, so many of these rugged coves in Cornwall, made a lasting impression on me, particularly if I saw them in stormy weather rather than the tranquil scene shown in this picture.
