​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.

I've had a thing for oak trees for a while, something about their fabulous accretion of symbolism and the amazing variety of life they support. I've got a design for a really large oak which is in an advanced state of incompletion all over my floor.

The sonnet quotation has had an extra resonance for me ever since I was studying for my history O-level several decades ago, and the teacher set me to read "Bare Ruined Choirs" by David Knowles. It's an account of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the terrible destruction wreaked upon a thousand years of English art and architecture. To say nothing of the souls and bodies those ruined choirs once sheltered.

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.