Oxford 2005 - 2006

I moved to Oxford in March to work at Oxford Brookes University. Initially,I spent months on my own, cycling around the canals and rivers, going to movies, missing the sea and trying to find a way into Oxford as a place to live and work. However,  I proceeded to paint every evening, weekend and day off from teaching at Brookes. I had to do work for two Xmas themed shows. One inspired by Rosseau's Jungle pictures for the John Martin Gallery and the other at the Scottish gallery with the title 'The Human Condition'. Sometimes having a theme gets ideas going a gives you a prod in a way you you don't expect. I decided to make the rivers and canals of Oxford my jungle and cats the wold animals which inhabit it.

In early 2006, I made a new series of painting for the Sarah Wiseman Gallery in Oxford. The show had an Oxford theme. I wanted to make these pictures topographically convincing to make the locations believable. I had so little time to make detailed drawing, so for once the use of digital photography was used. This certainly altered the kind of detail in the work.