egg tempera on panel, 20.5 x 30.5cm, October 2025
My studio is replete with characters. And my job is to assemble them in some way to share something. The characters in this drama were selected for my last painting, to represent objects I don’t own. They were stand-ins. I wondered how it would be to paint what I was looking at rather than someone else’s things, whether my familiarity with the space would be a bonus or a hindrance, whether the real objects in a different format would be very close to my last painting or whether they would be unique.
It’s that time of year to make my annual holiday card so I went up in the loft and found fabric that I hoped would transform my cat, Guan Yin, poodle and lion into something Decemberish – my annual office party, as it were.
As I painted, I was thinking about all the people who pass through our lives, become our friends, our family — who bring joy, and have populated my holidays. When I think about them in the round, I realise these objects aren’t far from my feeling about actual people in actual places. So here’s my office party, would you like to be a guest?
And then there is Gilda Radner and her ‘delicious ambiguity’ on which I dine daily.
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.” — Gilda Radner
egg tempera on panel, 20.5 x 30.5cm, October 2025
My studio is replete with characters. And my job is to assemble them in some way to share something. The characters in this drama were selected for my last painting, to represent objects I don’t own. They were stand-ins. I wondered how it would be to paint what I was looking at rather than someone else’s things, whether my familiarity with the space would be a bonus or a hindrance, whether the real objects in a different format would be very close to my last painting or whether they would be unique.
It’s that time of year to make my annual holiday card so I went up in the loft and found fabric that I hoped would transform my cat, Guan Yin, poodle and lion into something Decemberish – my annual office party, as it were.
As I painted, I was thinking about all the people who pass through our lives, become our friends, our family — who bring joy, and have populated my holidays. When I think about them in the round, I realise these objects aren’t far from my feeling about actual people in actual places. So here’s my office party, would you like to be a guest?
And then there is Gilda Radner and her ‘delicious ambiguity’ on which I dine daily.
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.” — Gilda Radner
