Here is the cover blurb for my memoir, followed by an extract from it. An elderly writer and painter with a rare, one-in-a-million congenital brain cancer is caught in a sinister Kafkaesque labyrinth of institutionalised incompetence, conscious cruelty, grotesque absurdity, moral corruption, cover up and lies. This true-life memoir is written in the blaze of […]
Scarlett Johansson & Eva
When I begin a portrait like that of Scarlett Johansson, or Eva, or Masha (Maria), women I may have known only briefly in real life if at all, it’s like plunging into an ocean of infinite possibilities from which in a state of exhilarated despair I hope to net something of the essence of these […]
Trust me I’m a brain surgeon
Sometimes I wish I could wake up as someone else, but then, if I had been someone else without my background and history in which, right from a small child I’d had to develop powerful strategies and skills to survive spiritually, emotionally and mentally as well as physically in an ever more dystopian world, I […]
The Brighton Triptych
‘The Brighton Triptych’: inspired by my Brighton poem ‘Lemon Jelly’ and my beloved Jean – a vision of goodness and loveliness distilled from all the women I have known, read about, or imagined, and yearned to find embodied in one radiant being who manifests herself to me with the luminosity of an ikon, or a […]
Portrait of a Scottish Poet and Painter
In the case of ‘Portrait of a Scottish Poet and Painter’ (one of many of this stunning beauty scattered randomly among the chaotic pages of this website) I responded to requests to exhibit an image as a work-in-progress, and so I displayed the half-finished canvas which, at that stage, I guess showed my muse in […]
My Daughter, Kathryn-Jayne
One day in 2005 it struck me that the face emerging from the mess of pigments which I kept scraping down was an image not of my studio model but my 18 year old daughter Kathryn-Jane whom I’d never seen (not even a photo) and whose whereabouts were unknown, driven purely by emotion and instinct […]
My Secret Scottish Muse
Having made my irrevocable decision to die, I began through painting to rediscover life and who else I am. And in hitherto inaccessible or forbidden places I met a bizarrerie of characters who teased out what lies buried deep inside me so that the final work is not just about them but a mingling of […]
Empathy, Virtual Reality, Hallucination and Dream
One reason to make paintings – as with films and literature – is to put the viewer, and even the painter (who can also be the protagonist) through the experiences and states of mind he or she in all likelihood would never otherwise experience, with the object of them finding a vicarious pleasure in feeling […]
