Weeping Willows

Weeping Willows
Oil on Canvas 2003
Owned by Stuart Douglas

I love it when inspiration comes from an unexpected place. I had been walking around the lake in Battersea Park and there are one or two lovely willows there. So they were in my consciousness, but I wasn’t intending to paint them when I made this. In fact, I wasn’t intending to paint at all. I thought I was finished for the day and was cleaning a brush, watching the colour dissolve in the turpentine and run down a page of an old telephone directory. (An excellent tip for brush and palette cleaning!) I liked the jumpy, organic quality of the line. The paint held in the brush was green. Willows suggested themselves instantly. I grabbed a piece of primed canvas and set to work. The fragility of the lines seemed to me to demand a lighter scumbled touch for the rest of the painting; thick painting would have killed the effect of the paint runs in the trees. It’s not something I’d do often, but I believe it is important to keep playing, stay open to new ideas that suggest themselves, and sometimes, even let technique inspire the subject matter. Using a completely different technique the same thing happened on “Curtain Call“…to follow…