The Naked Silo

20" x 24", oil on wood panel, 2014 As this project was in its early stages I wrote down a couple dozen possible titles for it, waiting to see how it shaped up before finally deciding on To the Sound of Trumpets . "Mars" appears in two separate titles:  Mars on the Horizon , suggesting the oncoming war (borrowing a snippet of a lyric from "Red Lenses" by Rush); and Mars Needs Men , suggesting the god of war's voracious appetite for combatants (upturning the title of a 1960s sci-fi b-movie ). The first one might still inspire a painting, but the second one morphed into Children of Mars ...but I'm not sure the resultant painting is entirely successful, conceptually. There are three sides to every story and World War One was the biggest story of the 20th Century (until its very own sequel); grim, exhausting, complicated, full of propaganda, broken promises, innocence lost, and so much death. So we have the Good Guys and the Bad Guys (depending on...

 36" x 54", oil on canvas, 2011, private collection As I was nearing completion of my Field to Canvas portrait series, I took on this commission, feeling confident that I could paint this (despite its huge size) and still paint the remaining few portraits in time for the opening in June. Everything worked out very well. The photo I received as reference for this painting showed the two boys from behind (thus featuring their life jackets), which was fine, but I felt the framing of the photo didn't give much information about context (where were they? in a boat? on a dock?) and it wasn't a very interesting composition. The red box below indicates the composition of the original photo ref: Since the woman who commissioned this (the boys' mom and, ultimately, a very satisfied customer) wanted a very large painting, I felt I could expand the composition by "pulling back the camera," so to speak, and still make the boys quite large in the fin...

15" x 22", watercolour, 2002, private collection Yes, banal title, but this, too, was made as an illustration sample and I was naming them descriptively for my various submissions and this one, like the rest of the kid paintings suffers that fate. Again, that's Alex on the left and Peter on the right.