​Eleven months since I added anything to this blog: the continuing need to improve my German, unending house renovations (not the glamorous kind) and Corona measures have all sapped my will to communicate. No point in regrets though. Luckily the brush has been busier than the pen all these months and it’s time to share again. I come back to publicity with a bump and with this large panel painting of birds raiding a grape vine which I recently delivered to the commissioning client for the reception area of his medical practice. He is a keen bird watcher, and had first refusal on my painting of birds in an oak tree. But he couldn’t reconcile himself to the yellow (how I love that singing yellow!) and asked if I could perhaps do it in blue. Needless to say I couldn’t. Copying is quite boring enough without the double injury of copying oneself. But a little Christmas gift commission, for a gardener whose precious grapes always get gobbled by the birds, inspired me to develop something much larger. Here's a snap of the finished painting propped up on my sofa (I actually had a professional photo taken, with an eye to getting prints made, but I haven't made a reduced version yet. It is egg tempera on a gessoed panel of my own manufacture, so that I can extend the design onto the frame. It is my characteristic mix of myopic naturalism and stylisation. I tried to pick birds that might actually be found raiding grapes in this part of the world, and to my relief the client was able to recognise each of them instantly. I think the he plans to distribute ‘colour-your-own’ versions to his younger patients in the waiting room. Here’s hoping none of them makes a better job of it than me.

A mighty long time ago I painted a tiny illumination on calf's vellum as a housewarming gift for someone retiring to their dream cottage in the Lake District: a verse of a favourite hymn which included a view over Windermere. Put it on my boasting page (Illuminations) and thought no more of it. It's gratifying to know that someone must be looking, because last month I received a commission for something in a similar vein intended for a 60th birthday present. The brief was to include the lovely medieval song fragment 'Westron Wynde', the view from Friar's Crag, and favourite creatures otters and swallows. It's amazing what you can fit into a space not much bigger than a business card.

Delighted yesterday to receive a complimentary copy of a new devotional book from the USA which features my icons! The main author, Dr Carla Sunberg is the president of the Church of the Nazarene's seminary in Kansas, and this little volume has grown out of her PhD researches into the doctrine of theosis, the Cappadocian Mothers, seven extraordinary women from one extraordinary Christian family who lived in Cappadocia (modern Turkey) in the fourth century. The males of the family, who include Basil the Great, are more known these days, so Dr Sunberg is redressing an imbalance in producing this volume of vitae and reflective exercises on these wives, sisters and mothers: all of them saints and spiritual warriors in their own right, some of them powerful land-owning matrons and society ladies, and some who renounced the world for Christ and took up the hermit's life. The author's husband commissioned a whole set of icons honouring the family while the research was in progress, which was a few years ago now. A nice surprise to have them revisited.

I recently sent off a commission for two more wonderful Celtic saints - and some more vermilion as it happens, always a passion of mine. Everyone knows of St Kevin, ascetic and abbot, hermit in the Irish wilds for many years. He is feted in verse in the immortal but irreverent Dubliners song ("There was an old Glendalough saint, renowned for his learning and piety. His manners were curious and quaint, and he looked upon girls with disparity"): and in the beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney which meditates on the legend of the blackbird which laid an egg in St Kevin's oustretched hand as he prayed. The poem reveals this parable of Christian self-sacrifice and suffering more eloquently and completely than I ever could either in paint or poetry.

St Melangell's life in Wales is well attested though less written on than Kevin's. Her shrine is still to be visited in Powys and was restored in 1992. St Melangell's legend is of a hare pursued by a hunting nobleman which bounded up and took refuge from the hounds in the folds of her cloak. Reputedly the hare runs fastest uphill and so symbolises the ascent of the human soul escaping the powers of darkness. I am mentally incorporating these two in my 'some day' iconographic project on the new creation.

Never work with children, animals or (I will add) unfamiliar scripts. St Ephrem (also spelled Ephraim) of Syria was a great theologian and hymn writer of the 4th century whose work seems to have fallen out of use in the West. Some time back I illuminated my own translation of his most famous prayer, though to my chagrin it has not sold yet.

My client for this new icon is an academic and scholar of Syriac, and I rashly agreed to copy the quotation in the original if it could be written out for me. The letters are less than a millimetre high, painted with a 00000 sable brush and written from right to left, as one might expect. Much gnashing of teeth has gone into this. Needless to say my first attempt was unreadable nonsense, but I am assured that the new improved version reads "Praise to the Lord of Nature; and glory to the Lord of Scripture" - or something acceptably close!

​Gregory in Poland contacted me to ask if I would make available a new image of the Venerable Matt Talbot, as he owes his life to the (yet to be declared) saint and is using all his personal resources to publish prayer cards and spread the devotion over the web.

Matt Talbot is known as the saint in overalls, though I think that's a bit off the mark, since he is wearing a perfectly respectable working man's suit in the only photograph we have of him. And he made it his custom to appear very neat and tidy in public. It was a great privilege to research this remarkable story. Outwardly he lived a completely obscure working class life in Victorian and Edwardian Dublin, living quietly through rebellion and unrest, world war and civil war, as well as enduring the daily deprivations of a labourer's life in those harsh times. Only his sudden death in the street on the way to Mass one Sunday revealed the extraordinary 'real' life he led: he was found to be wearing chains under his clothes, those chains still to be seen among his relics. After taking the pledge in his late twenties, through a life of religious devotion and self-mortification he had overcome his alcoholic addiction, educated himself to read works of theology and spent his private life in prayer and contemplation. He is a champion for people around the world fighting addiction to alcohol and drugs.

The photograph in which Matt Talbot appears is a grainy sepia group picture, taken with his workmates in the workshop. His face enlarges to nothing but a smudge, but one can just make out a face in later middle age, bright eyes, a receding hairline, a copious moustache and a certain set of the chin. For the details of his earthly appearance, we have to rely nearly as much on inspiration as we do for his early Celtic predecessors, but the course of his life is much better attested.

Just in time for his feast on 11th February, I was last week delighted to add St Berach of Kilbarry to the little clutch of less known Celtic saints I have been commissioned to paint: another first I think, at least as he is represented on the web. St Berach's life in the 6th century in Ireland has a few well-attested facts and a great number of fairy tales. He was a disciple of St Kevin, built a church, and is still greatly reverenced in Roscommon. This is a hand-sized icon designed to travel with his owner, for whose family St Berach has a special significance.

I drew for my design on the illuminations in the Book of Mulling, which was painted (only!) two hundred years after the death of St Berach. The hairstyle and robes owe a great deal to St John, seen below in the original - faded but still startlingly blond and blue-eyed. For the face and beard I also confess to a touch of The Dubliners in their later manifestation, I'll leave you to guess which one.

Thanks to the generosity of Trinity College, Dublin who own the manuscript and make public their technical researches, I was even able to approximate the pigments used in the original. For other pigment 'anoraks' out there, these were various ochres (John's curls are yellow ochre), indigo blue, organic pinks and purples and orpiment. Orpiment is a startlingly bright lemon yellow, an arsenic compound. I actually have a sample of the pigment, but decided to substitute with a cadmium mix identical in colour but less poisonous. Indigo and organic compounds don't last so well on a panel as between the pages of a book. I used indigo for the underpainting but enhanced it with azurite and egyptian blue: contemporary, but perhaps not easy to obtain in 6th century Ireland. The purple-red is indigo overpainted with natural carmine, but as I did not adopt the flat geometric style of the manuscript I found it necessary to highlight with a little cinnabar: probably just as poisonous as the orpiment I rejected. Ah well... The green background is a mottled application of indigo glazed with yellow ochre and my orpiment substitute.

​To represent his hermitage and the abbey he founded, he is clutching a stone chapel of ancient Irish form. His abbot's crozier I copied from an ancient example dug up in a peat bog. These had a little reliquary chamber in the their ends and were staves of mighty talismanic power with which the early Irish clerics warded off the forces of darkness as they strode around the wild and sodden landscape of pagan Europe. I tell you the Desert Fathers had nothing over these fearsome Celtic hermits and evangelists, they were redoubtable spiritual warriors. They travelled to and fro to Sinai and Byzantium on networking visits, and even spread their mission over here to Austria, in those early days a truly terrifying landscape for any visitor, never mind a stray Christian.

My lovely client in Northern Ireland asked for a Holy Family a bit windswept and shocked by the whole experience of the Nativity! In my understanding this very Catholic feast, celebrated on 31st December, makes important reference to the family of the Holy Trinity and the reciprocal bonds of divine love, so I decided rather to go for slightly careworn and perhaps anticipating pain. In the end I worked without reference to any prototype icon, as I find most of them horribly sentimental and inappropriate to the cosmic grandeur of the underlying meanings. So I have drawn Jesus not as a baby but as Christ Emmanuel with arms outstretched in a crucifixion/embracing pose. The three intersecting haloes extending into the borders are also intentionally symbolic. 

This post was intended to be about the technicalities of using palladium leaf, which I tried for the first time on this miniature commissioned by a client in New York.

Instead, it turns out to be an in memoriam to a piece forever lost by the United States Postal Service. Posted priority airmail on 16 September 2017, departed Austria 18 September, arrived New York 19 September and never heard of since. 

It astonishes me that the richest nation on earth cannot get themselves together sufficiently to provide themselves with basic healthcare, good public education and a properly functioning post service. These things are the very bedrock of a civilised society people, what is wrong over there? Isn't it bad enough that a letter takes two days to cross the Atlantic and three weeks to cross New York? This affects business badly. You can't do business with a place where the postal service is insecure, it's like sending to Africa. (Don't, by the way, not ever). You know, they employ large people in US sorting offices to throw parcels around and stamp on them, to ensure the corners arrive bashed and broken. It's happened too many times to be a coincidence: no amount of wrapping is proof against these people. And they pay small folks to scurry round tucking registered mail into neglected corners to ensure that it will never be either delivered or returned.

If the client hasn't entirely lost interest by now, I shall have to repaint. I shall have to charge him for a courier next time.