Mark my words.....

Into the Depths (oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins)

This is one of the reasons I've been quiet. Getting pictures ready for another exhibition. This time it's the Gallery Friends Show, with a theme of "art from words" to try to get the more conservative members to think outside the box.

Won't work, of course. Last year we used an "art from art" theme and still got the usual watercolours of bunches of flowers, allegedly based on some obscure Dutch work. This year they'll be on even safer ground, what with the availability of Wordsworth's daffs and the like.

Not that I can honestly say my entries are actually based on literature. The picture above was done a couple of years ago and was based on a shelled building in Cyprus. I've simply hung an Orpheus & Eurydice tag on it.

No photographs of the other two yet. The second one was another 36 x 36 ins unfinished work called Woman in a Garden. Patsy123 helped out by finding a couple of verses from a D H Lawrence poem called Snap-Dragon and I reworked the woman. I'm still not sure about it, but it's been accepted, so I'll think again when it comes back (I regard these Friends' shows as a chance to show slightly unusual work, knowing it won't sell. It's the watercolour bunches of flowers that always sell.)

The last one is very much an oddity. It's 24 x 24 ins and based on Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold. It started out as something out of die Neue Sachlichkeit but I was uncomfortable with the way the two figures were not contained within the picture area. I got rid of the subsidiary figure and it started to look like a mid-period Paula Rego. Then it simply took on a life of its own and became what it is now. Very strange.