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Moon Series

A selection of oil paintings, watercolours and ink and wash drawings based on the phases of the moon.

This series began as a meditation on the moon — not just as an object in the sky, but as a kind of witness to time, change, and solitude. The moonlight I’ve drawn here doesn’t illuminate so much as haunt. It weaves through branches, slips across ponds, and drifts behind tangled silhouettes. I see it often while walking late or remembering childhoods shaped by rural nightscapes.

Working sometimes in oils, but often in ink and watercolour allowed me to keep the process fluid and instinctive. The ink lines move like nerves or roots — quick, searching — while the washes act like weather, drifting over the surface with their own will.

Though there are no people in these images, the human presence is implied: someone watching, someone remembering, someone perhaps lost in thought at the forest’s edge.

The Moon Series forms a kind of quiet, internal counterpart to People of the Soil — where one is marked by the physical toll of land, the other turns inward toward dreams, weather, and memory.

Song For My Father 90x90cm oil on canvas

Pen and wash and gouache paintings

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A selection from the Moon series in various media on A4 and A3 paper

An unashamedly sentimental painting which attempts to reimagine the place of my childhood on a cold and frosty winter evening. The atmosphere is one of remoteness, the bleak landscape and the frozen rivulet and icy hillsides. The only other source of light comes from the windows of the chapel on the hill. Although the image may seem cold and sparse, for much of the year the little hamlet of Tainant, situated near the eastern edge of the Berwyn hills, was  a wonderful place in which to grow up.

The moon and its cycles were particularly important in the planting and harvesting of crops, the new moon being said to draw the newly germinated seeds up through the soil.

Tainant in winter 90x80cm oil on canvas

The Valleys of Wales (North and South) have long been associated with industrialisation and the ravaging of the countryside. This painting is another reflection of my memories of seeing these places, not as carbuncles on the face of the countryside, but as the providers of incomes and communities to working families. I make no attempt to romanticise the hardship. This painting already shows the decline of an industrial past and nature retaking areas, watched over by a full moon and the remains of a moon on the wane.

Valley Terraces 90x90cm oil on canvas

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