I spent Christmas Day with my niece Louisa and her family in Marlow, first picking up Val in Henley on the way. Lunch was delicious. Here’s Louisa carving the turkey. And this is Kate, my eight year old great niece.  Kate is a really interesting and talented little girl. Her ambition is to become an […]

I’m getting ready to enter the BP Portrait of the Year competition. There’s another few weeks before entries have to be submitted and I’m well on the way with my second painting. So far I’ve put in about 140 hours on this large almost life-size watercolour. I met this man in northern Thailand some years […]

Yesterday afternoon my young friend, her mother, and I visited Thomas Gainsborough’s house in Sudbury, Suffolk. This is a view of the house from the garden. And from the front. Thomas Gainsborough was the leading English portrait painter in the mid eighteenth century. His only real rival was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Equally at home with […]