Isolated Observations, April 2020.
The motif is the robin - the plucky character that joins (permits, tolerates?) me in the garden from which I have been working in the last two months. He's become a talisman, embodying a pragmatic stoicism and fierce survivalism that I can observe from my garden studio and aspire to in the face of all the challenges being thrown up right now. Some works contain just one robin, with others containing two (as team, as competitors). But there's also that cold bird's eye, revealing nothing but a vital, primal fear. They are also, then, perhaps aspirational self-portraits. The paint is loose in places, layered in others; thin here, thick there. While there could be a temptation to see them as a series or a collection of works in dialogue with each other, they're not - each painting is, I hope, an act of solitary defiance.