House being built, stray dog

House being built, stray dog, oil on card, 14.5 / 11 cm - unavailable

A sort of kitchen sink realism here. There's a British school of painting which is very much about concentrated looking, and includes people as various as Bratby, Freud and Millais. Usually the subject matter of such pictures is banal and what matters is the intensity of scrutiny: it's anti-picturesque.

I must admit, that I don't actually much like this school, despite having entered the mindset myself here.

The roots of a fallen tree

The roots of a fallen tree, oil on card, 10.6 x 8 cm; 54 US$

I haven't painted many things close up for a while.

In his excellent book, "William Nicholson", Samford Schwartz describes a certain type of very closely scrutinised painting of nature, apparantly without artifice, and exemplified most recently by Lucien Freud as tendency particular to British art. He includes Stanley Spencer and the pe-Raphaelites in this current.