Seeing Double

I sometimes paint a pair of pictures - a diptych - two that make one, and working on two panels can help make a large scale project more manageable.

I painted pub signs in the 1980's, hundreds of them, for ten years, and for each one I painted the same picture twice.

So in a sense this is an old habit revisited.

Here I decided to have two pictures that included almost identical elements, but arranged differently. I could have stopped with the grid of coloured blocks, with their suggestion of a horizon, and their sky and land colours.

But I really wanted something to grow across the block pattern and break it up further, so the deep yellow tree led on to the seasonal strangeness of blossom and snow, and a little Winter/Spring story unfolded.

Folk Tale, and Folk Tale Too

Acrylic on panel (20 x 20cms)

When I painted these I was reading 'Pat Metheny - The ECM Years', and listening to all of that folk tinged music as I worked.

Also, somewhere in the distant past, on the back of a toilet door, there was a calendar of naive art that I studied every day (for a year). Influences....