I do love painting the figure and some of my most successful and popular paintings have been my figure paintings, but I’m feeling in the mood for a new project to kickstart 2024. So I’ve started a series of Plant Portraits painted on wood cradle panels, inspired by everyone’s love of houseplants and just plants in general.

So instead of working on canvas I have decided to complete this series on cradled panels, which are incidentally incredibly easy to hang, and, look great without a frame. Each cradle is 26 cm x 20 cm x 2 cm deep.

Another reason for the wooden cradle panel is I just love the ease at which the paint glides over the surface. Of course, the surface does need preparing with gesso (several layers if poss) to give a bit of bite to the oils, otherwise the paint will glide way too much and it will take many layers of oil paint for the paint to look opaque.

A further bit of news is I am currently planning to open my Folksy online shop to sell my Plant Portraits. To accompany the portraits, I will also be selling Plant Portrait greetings cards and prints of the original artwork. More on that soon…

Thanks for reading!

Tx