The Naked Silo

20" x 16", oil on canvas, 2014 Trench songs feature in a few pieces in my World War One painting project , but they're most prominent in this one and in "Why Are We Here?" , having some of the words scratched into the paint. I could have found image reference of an actual soldier tangled in barbed wire for this, but I decided to look through my photos from my trip to Italy last March, knowing there I'd taken a shot or two of Michelangelo's  Pietà . My idea was to extract Jesus from Mary's embrace and string him up in barbed wire for my Remembrance section, emphasizing the theme of sacrifice. My sketch of the figure in my notebook looked wobbly and rough, but nice and alive and reminded me of Egon Schiele 's drawing style, so I then chose to emulate his style for the figure in the final piece.

Ink & Digital, 2004 This was the first Christmas card I illustrated because I wanted to send out something I made myself to friends and family. Being a Christmas card I figured it should feature the Big J (Baby J?), but I thought it would be more interesting to be a little circumspect, so I came up with the idea of having a woman (modelled by Krista, by the way) doing a needlepoint of the magic baby and his mom. The landscape in the background is a scene an Orthodox monastery in the lakeside city of Ohrid in Macedonia. The following year I made this other card  which focused even more on traditional Macedonian and winter imagery and less on the religious aspect (although it did still say "Merry Christmas" in Cyrillic).