During my last trip the UK I had a day out with a friend from Whitstable on a glorious sunny afternoon in early November. We drove along swooningly beautiful narrow country lanes through the Downs and then on to the South Kent coast.

On the way back we stopped at Farthing Common to admire the view and a fiery sunset over the Weald. There are some terrific chestnut trees on the Common, with short, thick trunks and massive sculptural branches and I made this study based on photos I took that day.

It has a distinctly Neo-Romantic feel to me, it reminds me of work from the late 1930s and early 1940s by artists such as John Minton, Graham Sutherland, and John Craxton. These artists were making images during war-time of course and their work often has a rather brooding quality, with dark skies, twisted forms and heightened colour palettes. Some of them were also employed as war artists, recording the war effort and the terrible effects of bombing on the urban landscape. The atmosphere of much of their work feels quite elegiac, as if everything they painted could be lost forever if the forces of fascism prevailed in the war. The future was on a knife edge and this gave much of the work a strange intensity that went with the times.

Whilst we’re not at war now, this year has been, for many, extremely challenging in other ways. There was much of talk of ‘the new normal’ and wondering if things would ever be quite the same again. These great, solid trees stood like silent sentinels on the brow of the hill, looking out over the land rather impassively, as if they knew they would see it out whatever happened, they had a sense of permanence to them while we stood looking out at the sun going down, straining our eyes to see what was on the horizon, what was coming out way.

We’re approaching midwinter and I often make images of high summer at this time of year. It’s a bit of an antidote to the cold grey weather, something to remind me of warm evenings and vibrant colour, of long hot days that have been and that will come again.

So, this week, I made a collage based on a wonderful Kent garden I visited with a friend a couple of years ago on a perfect summer’s afternoon. The garden is situated in the middle of the Kent Downs, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and very worthy of the designation; at any time of year the Downs are beautiful, but in summer they’re magical.

It’s been a sad week this week too, as I heard of the death of somebody I knew from school days called Jane. Jane was strikingly beautiful, but she wore her beauty lightly. She was also exceptionally kind, and was a person of great depth. She was creative in many ways, making music and wonderful abstract paintings. I didn’t know her well, but I can still remember her lovely voice so clearly, her sense of fun, and her unique character. Her passing feels so wrong. I’m reminded of the words in the Joni Mitchell song, Clouds, ‘I really don’t know life at all’.

Painting and drawing can be a help for me when life’s complexities and difficulties rear their head. Earlier this year I watched a video online of the artist Maggie Hambling (I’m a huge fan) talking about her life and work. She talked about making painting her best friend, the place she could always go to whatever was happening, whatever mood she was in. I really liked the idea, not just that painting, or anything else, can be a comfort and a refuge, but that it can also be a place of celebration, of joy, of confusion, doubt, sexiness, love, fear – the whole kit and caboodle in fact.

But for now, as we approach the end of a tumultuous year, i’ll just remember a perfect summer’s day, and look forward to more, before not too long I hope!