Sketches

This is an illustration of the process I often use: seeing an event unfolding in a moment, capturing the bare essence of it , with enough information there to carry out a finished oil painting in the studio.
Throughout my career as a painter I have valued drawing from life as an essential basis for all my work.
A drawing can capture elements of a moment with a sincerity and passion able to evoke the feeling of a place or person in a way impossible in a photograph.

Rapidly drawing a moving figure can evoke the feeling rather than the appearance of the subject. These very quick images are often translated into paintings rather than deliberate “life drawings”. Memory provides more than the physical drawing conveys toward this end.

Left: watercolour pencil sketch winter solstice - Right: The Birth of the Sun - oil on canvas - 24 X 30 inches
Collection of Mr and Mrs N. Ward (UK)


The habit of carrying a sketch book, however lowly, to record such moments is the best trigger for the memory. A sketchbook can rekindle a nostalgia or fond memory years after the event. These feelings are somehow etched in consciousness by the physical and mental action of drawing.
Even years later, perhaps because of the concentration involved in trying to capture a fleeting glimpse of light falling on trees or the way the grass moves or a street scene, the moment is recalled exactly as it was. Photographs cannot do this. To train the eye-to-hand co-ordination for this purpose is so important and is like a meditation in a heightened awareness.

The Birth of the Sun was adopted by Christianity from ‘pagan’ origins.