Last year I painted away merrily, randomly finding inspiration for my paintings of animals from various sources including Pinterest, Facebook, and my own photographs. However, I never realized that even though I thought I was making seemingly random choices of subject matter and colour palette, I was in fact sticking to a theme!
It was on closer inspection of my recent body of work, that I discovered that I had created a group of animal paintings that were in similar shades of browns, oranges, ochres and umbers, and that I had mostly chosen small animals that live in wooded areas in Europe.
The woods have long held a fascination for me. I grew up next to a wood in England and it was a magical place to enter. A neighbour fashioned a large rope with a knot you could sit on, and all the road’s children used to take turns swinging into the wood and back again. We couldn’t wait for horse-chestnut season and the conker games that ensued. Although personally, I was more interested in whether I’d get my hand whalloped than the outcome of the game.
Oh, and the smell of a wood! That musty, earthy but still sweet scent. It’s no surprise to me that these animals make their homes there. I can just imagine the little dormouse sleeping snugly through the winter in his blanket of warm leaves, or the squirrels racing through the treetops.
