I often put down a piece of paper or card on top of the table in my studio to give me a clear surface to work on. After a while, these papers become covered in paint, and then I replace them with a clean sheet. They become quite interesting and sometimes beautiful in their own right, here’s a few examples:

In fact, I love the results of the accidental mark making so much I could put some of them in a frame and hang them on the wall. So, I usually keep them, ‘upcycling’ them to make collage out of,  or, in this case, a maquette of a centaur. The lively marks resulting from my splashing paint about or spraying things to use in model making are so good for this kind of thing; I could never make them deliberately it seems!

Centaurs started to appear in my work last year. I’m intrigued by their dual nature, a wonderful representation of the ‘divided’ self, a being with an explicitly animal and human body, a union of conscious and unconscious, intellectual and sensuous.

My friend Sarah Parvin recently added a ‘Man/Beast’ board on her peerless Pinterest site The Curious One. It’s full of wonderful images on the theme, you can follow a link to it here. Have a browse around the wonderful world Sarah has created at The Curious One, you’re guaranteed a rewarding and inspiring time there!

Here are a couple more snaps of my centaur chappy; in this case a union between accidentally made marks and intentionally made ones:

I like a spinney, I like the word, and I like the things themselves.  Small, unassuming clumps of tress and bushes, they are little oases for wildlife and even though they are tiny, you step inside one and you’re immediately in a slightly different world, the leaves and branches muffle the sound of the ‘outside’, the air is different, the smells are different. I’ve stepped inside some and found little pools with fish swimming about or the ruins of an old cottage.

When I was growing up in rural Lincolnshire in the ’70s, the countryside round about was being cleared of many of its beautiful trees and hedgerows to make ever bigger – and more profitable – fields for the farmers. Anything that managed to cling on was something to be celebrated (as an aside, Joni Mitchell captured the urban equivalent in her song Chinese Cafe when she sung of ‘paving over brave little parks’). But nature bit back, and when we had a rather stormy autumn one year the soil all blew away off the fields and created a mini dustbowl as the country had lost the protection of the hedges and windbreaks.

Nowadays we seem to value such things more, although i still see campaigns to save trees which are going to be cut down for some development or other.

I woke up this morning to the sound of sleet being flung at the windows by a strong gale, its proper wintry today. So, in keeping with the weather, this little spinney study is a rather spooky place, shivering in hard frosty night. The next few days look set to stay cold too. Well, at least the days are getting longer – as I keep telling myself!