Ciao beautiful Art friends,

Here are some snapshots of my paintings this week; I was working on them during my Co-Creation Sessions with beautiful friends Hive account@ninasophia and Hive account@theastone - which we do each Wednesday :-)

This first one is on an old shelf, beautiful hardwood, which I reclaimed from inside of a dismantled bread oven, when I was fixing up my abandoned house I'd just bought here. The image has been developing for quite a few years now...

The second is on a piece of relatively crappy board; that wierd foamy stuff with card on both sides of the foam.

I quite love working on unusual surfaces, as it challenges one to improvise, and this is my favourite space to be in. I love the necessity to adapt one's mark-making, layering and presence, to the unexpected.

Here, I've used oil paint, posca pen, pencil and oil pastels, and a layer of gold acrylic too.

I'm enjoying very much this golden section, where I'm exploring the difference between the straight-lines of written English text, and the expressive abstraction of letting non-verbal language form into language-like shapes.

I've done that a lot in paintings, over my Art life. Developing marks to more fully express feeling, and presenting them in a kind of 'language' or verbal-structure-like way. It feels very deeply satisfying, and to me, it relates to the reclaiming of my older, more primal and connected with landscape language of my country of origin.

It's very satisfying for both of these paintings to be coming to completion after so many years in development: sometimes it gets hard to finish an Artwork, when it has gone through so many phases and doesn't ever seem to be coming to conclusion!