In this heat, I have forgotten my manners to the lifeline offered to me a month ago - after a month of retiring from the heatwave, and imagining writing a letter I never sent.

It is a strange experience for a painter to see his work lifted to a new destination. We are governed by self criticism in a studio, weighted by our disatisfaction, reassured by the odd purple prosed passage of paint which we come to mistrust before wiping it clean and starting again.

Ten, 2024,Mixed media on paper,120 cm x 100 cm, Private Collection.

This is not music to those who think how wonderful it is to be a painter. And yet it is - wonderful. To see how something we have created might speak its own indecipherable language and make itself known to others. If we are disbelieving, it is because the roar of doubt is constantly in our ears.

Five large mixed media paintings hang at the end of the main wall in the Highgate Gallery. They are the implemented aims of my hopes to do larger works of these subjects from their smaller cousins in lockdown.

The still life on the far left reaches into the past, intitially a figure hovered where the sky and strelizias move like a crested crane passing a window of blue. The landscapes of Bagendon, each with a vehicle cupped in the hands of the composition. Peter’s Car, leaning into the shoulder of the lane and the whoosh of the hill as I sledge down it before ramping up the path that softens into the woods. Or my old van, parked near the church, silently confessing its oil leak to my friends whose house looks back at us, it’s stone facade smiling into the August sun.

Bagendon, August, 2024, Mixed media on paper,120 cm x 90 cm.

How sunflowers burst from an arrangement of cool magenta. They bounce across to the background colour of copper pink in Sunrise- The Blue Chair. The chair which has seated the absence of people present and past. The eternal feminine. The sun rising, the sun setting, the sun never forgetting like a searchlight on the roll of people most prominent in my heart and mind, a living epitaph to time sped by.

The walls unfurl a roll call of gratitude between strokes of paint and pastel. The framers, whose expertise make the paintings sing, the gallery staff who make it happen, the collectors, the supporters, the friends who visit from afar and close by and have literally and metaphorically carried me here. The models, the landscapes, the flowers. A profound thank you to all of you.

White Hydrangeas, 2026, oil on Linen, 75 cm x 65 cm

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“But you are white!”, he said, after I had told him I was from Zimbabwe. Edinburgh College of Art. The man was the distinguished painter, David Michie, son of the great Scottish painter Anne Redpath. It was 1992, and my first One Man Show in Edinburgh at the Scottish Gallery, was happening that year and I was enquiring to see if I could get some teaching work at the College. It was clear that this irony couldn’t allow him to take me seriously! And that was the principal reason I liked his work, for it’s humour. He was due to have a One Man Show at the Gallery two years later. One day, I thought to myself, I will buy one of his paintings.

The Old School House, Sunset, 2026, Oil on Canvas, 40 cm x 50 cm £2150.00

It is July 2026. A month earlier I have just finished an exhibition in London at the Highgate Gallery which has gone well. Floods of people in the first three days with two openings and an annual happening, Fair in the Square, outside the gallery which brings thousands of people to the square over the day. I have made some sales already before the opening with the catalogue. And over the next fortnight , a steady stream of people, including wonderful suprise apearances from friends and family. The space has excellent light and shows off some of my larger paintings on view favourably. The staff are exceptional. And there is the great gift of seeing one’s work away from the studio. Over the next weeks, I can re evaluate it.

I look hard at two paintings which I know people are interested in. And I know that something bothers me in each of them which means that I will rework them if they get back to the studio. Exhibitions have great benefits but they break continuity, and quite rightly and importantly, they can turn the painter upside down with their ability to make the artist reassess what he is doing. It is inevitable. The first painting I want to rework is an oil of the Old School House.

The summer heat is considerable. Not only am I exhausted from the build up to the show, but the heat drives me like a mediterranean man to the cool of his house in the middle of the day for a siesta. Eventually, I head back into the landscape when it is cooler and I set up outside to revisit the Old School House. I drive the notion of colour away from the painting and allow the drama of tone in the pastoral to carry its weight with the paint. All through this, although I am exercised by the restructuring of the entire painting, the sheep pay only a passing interest in me, their indifference slowly digesting with the lowering temperature and fading light.

Pastoral, 2026, Oil on Linen, 70 cm x 90 cm £4250

I have already reworked a smaller version of the painting of the same subject, retrieving the colour as an important facet of the drama of the solitary house with the road in the landscape. In a small way, it does feel like a portrait of the previous weeks. where the road leads to the building where these opportunities are housed, but it is solitary, for the decisions, the awareness of one’s singular responsabilities with the marks and assessments one makes with each work that I must answer for.

At the exhibition, an elegant looking couple visit with their family. I can tell they are used to looking at paintings, and they look at them carefully, critically, appraisingly: each generation shifting between the works, looking into and through them . The wife is very taken with the remaining painting of a series of four Amaryllis paintings done this year. It is the first one I started and has gone through so many versions of itself. At the beginning of the show, I am pleased with where it is. By the end, I am not sure, and know that I will likely change it. The husband is not sure. A difficult moment for us all. The wife is disappointed, and I am too, but I know it needs revision.

Red Amaryllis, 2026, Oil on Linen, 100 cm x 70 cm £5500.00

It returns to the studio, and over the next few days and weeks, I look at it and plan my assault. Eventually, I am relieved that I have made the changes although I can never be sure that I am right. But I think that I am here, it has come alive again, revived by reappraisal. Nevertheless, I take myself off to town to buy some flowers for the next painting. Across the road from the florist is a gallery. A month earlier, I had been in only to find a painting of mine done in Italy for sale from my first one man show at the Scottish Gallery in 1992.

I walk over to the gallery, wondering whether to buy this Italian painting back. A painting on the opposite wall catches my attention. The gallery dealer confirms this as he shows me the reverse side. It reads ‘ David Michie, RSA, RGI, RWA. “Green Heron, Santa Barbara Harbour”, 8 x 9 inches, oil on board. Recent Paintings, The `Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh.From the 2nd July - 6th August 1994’.

The heron’s eye glints at me with a knowing half smile from the depths of the landscape behind it’s nest. “One day”, it says, “has arrived”.

If you would like a hard backed copy of the Exhibition Catalogue from my recent show in London, the book company Blurb are selling them for £65.00 each. They are beautifully done, but expensive for those who like to use them as colouring in books.

Please email me at christopher.johnson215@gmail if you would like to order one, or discuss any of the paintings here for sale.

I continue to be massively grateful to all of you subscribers, and any assistance and support with my Substack venture is hugely appreciated.

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Yet again, I have had to call upon Eric, my cinematographer at Drunk Warthog Productions to allow you a somewhat erratic survey of my exhibition. I suppose what I am saying is that to avoid dizzy spells, if you can and would like to, please make sure you come for the last day on Wednesday the 24th of June and for a limited time on the 25th of June between 1 pm and 5pm to see my exhibition at The Highgate Gallery, Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS .

The Blue Chair and Places in Between is shortly to come to an end. It has been a fantastic exhibition, reconnecting with old friends and enjoying meeting a host of new people in one of the most glorious spaces I have shown in for its space, clarity and the fulsome support that The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution offers with their superb staff who couldnt be more helpful and welcoming.

Please do come to see it if you can, and for those who are interested in buying work, the catalogue is available to access below here.

A massive thank you to collectors old and new for your purchases!

Peter’s Car, 2026, Mixed Media on Paper, 120 cm x 90 cm

‘The Blue Chair Exhibition’ is showing at at:

The Highgate Gallery, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS

12th to the 25th of June

To look through the exhibition catalogue, please click the button below. Please email me if you’d like a price list: christopher.johnson215@gmail.com

The Blue Chair Catalogue

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The Old School House, Balmy Evening, 2026, Oil on Linen, 70 cm x 90 cm

With the country reeling from the murder of Henry Nowak, it seems incidental to talk about bringing an exhibition together and how one composes and integrates the consituent parts as a whole. When we are faced with such societal disintegration and aggression, the shock leaves us numb with disbelief that people can treat others with such disregard for their humanity. How can we, in however modest a way, rebuild a humane attitude and regard for the peace towards each human being, and their place here, at least to the memory of innocents like Henry Nowak?

Perhaps the art of painting can help; too easily, we might assume that it is simply the art of expressing oneself. Legitimising that belief can have awful ends, however liberating that notion might appear to be. There are rules to painting, developed over millenia. They accord with understanding the range and limits of materials, ways of depiction, the osmosis of cultured taste and understanding throughout the ages, the tennis match of conversations through each epoque, refining and loosening or tightening our grip on the understanding of who we are in this age, in relation to the past.

The French Nabis painter Pierre Bonnard quickly understood that painting is as much or more about composition than anything else. So composing a painting, as I would imagine orchestrating a symphony, is made up of many different parts, and it is in the thinking, the intelligence, the sensitivity to the integration of these parts and encouraging the small and big conversations that rise to a volcanic transformation by letting them work together, and sometimes against one another that transfers us to a broader understanding of our cosmos via the discipline at hand.

Each element has a part to play to make up the whole. In painting, it might even be a swathe of an area which doesnt seem to be doing much at all, or it could be a miniscule touch of cadmium red that sets alight the greens nearby and gives the painting a focal point.

All of these considerations are also found in the hanging of an exhibition. Selecting paintings that “speak” to one another, through a connected shape or colour or subject. Allowing them to work like a well written sentence, while rising and falling, needing to be read as a linear statement, but also as an integrated whole with conversations bubbling between them .

There are also the difficult decisions of what we leave out. In both paintings and selecting work for exhibitions, it might often be that some of the works dearest to us simply don’t fit. I always used to reassure myself that was why I was never selected to play soccer at any useful level at school, or was it my propensity to score “own goals?”

View from Hill 60, 2021, Oil on Linen, 130 cm x 110 cm

One needs the courage to leave out things that don’t have a place in the painting or the exhibition. Clarity and coherence are vital. Each gallery will have their own way of making this apparent in the hanging, and there is definitely an art to it. It is a wonderful thing to watch people with decades of experience moving paintings like chess pieces around one another until the sentences cohere.

It is in the vessels of this coherence, in this extraordinary drive for unity and wholeness in a painting that I believe we can access - through some incomprehensible subliminal order - a means to healing, to putting our world aright, to be offered the hand that leads us away from the damage and closer to something that can restore our thinking. A way to perceive and evaluate without a stubborn obedience to an unthinking norm. It allows us to breathe, it can set us free from idle misconceptions. In looking closely, examining something for its beauty as a working part of something bigger than us, it might even humble us and offer us time to think in this busy age, to make better decisions.

We are called to live lightly on our feet - but the dance needs to be grounded in our good regard for one another, not the staccato notes of hate. Paintings need space just as we humans do - to evaluate, surmise, think intelligently, pause, consider and reconsider. We need these moments in this field of contemplation, a ”set aside”. They are the places which give us the vital reckoning of what it is that connects us to each other.

I hope, in time, they might even play a part in consoling some, and reorientating others through the dark headlines and sentences from this week.

Peter’s House, Spring 2026, Oil on Linen, 80 cm x 100 cm

This is a reminder that ‘The Blue Chair Exhibition’ is showing at at:

The Highgate Gallery, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS

12th to the 25th of June

To look through the exhibition catalogue, please click the button below. Please email me if you’d like a price list: christopher.johnson215@gmail.com

The Blue Chair Catalogue

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Blue Hydrengeas, 2026, Oil on Linen, 75 cm x 65 cm.

I’ve adopted the normal practice for galleries with allowing the catalogue to stand alone as an item to mull over, and then for the price list to be sent by request to your email address if you would like to see it, easily done at the press of a button.

I had a fascinating discussion with an old friend today about this, and the difference between viewing a painting virtually, on line or in a book, and its corresponding alternative of the experience of being in front of it as a physical object containting the commitment of time, and the voluntary immersion into the emotional, intellectual and the métier of the painter at that time. With these thoughts in mind, I hope you enjoy the catalogue and it encourages you to bring your experience to my paintings.

The Blue Chair Catalogue

Thank you to all of you for your continued support on Substack, especially to new paying Subscribers and Founder Members whose support is massively appreciated. To new readers, I welcome your interest. Do have a look at options available to you.

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My eye was distracted by something in the gallery from across the street. Leaving the suspicious gaze of a shop attendant, I stopped fondling the hydrangeas I was thinking of buying to paint, and jaywalked over to the gallery. Through the window, I could see a painting that looked familiar. I went in, no one was at the desk and so I looked more closely at the painting, shook my head and smiled. I hadn’t seen it since I sold it throught the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1992 at my first One Man Show there. How on earth had it ended up some 350 miles away, 34 years later?

It was a view of Montalcino from where I had been staying in Tuscany, house sitting for a friend. She was really doing me the favour of introducing me to the area while she and her boyfriend holidayed at some hot springs not far away. The paintings were either exhibited in Edinburgh or in London, and I felt very grand staying in a weatherbeaten flat belonging to a relative of the actor James Coburn where I billeted in London after returning from Italy.

Hoping that at least some of the stardust from James Coburn might magically reappear, I returned to the hydrangeas. Another familiar face from the past slipped through the shoppers. It was the daughter of collectors who had bought my work in the 1990s. Before she had died, her mother stayed in a home and had taken one of my flower paintings for the wall in her bedroom. I felt both flattered and comforted that she had chosen it, as they had a magnificent collection to choose from. We had a quick chat before the hydrangeas were ferried by a lady to the till.

Red Amaryllis, 2026, Oil on Linen, 100 cm x 70 cm

The teller, a sparky young man, eyed the flowers and smiled knowingly at me. I’m going to paint them , I said. He smiled again, No you are not, transaction declined! For goodness sake, please keep them behind the till. I will be back right away. I transferred funds and roared back with cash. So tell me , he said, with a hint of mischief, does that no cash wheeze work on all of your dates? I roared with laughter. I hadn’t thought of doing it. Does it work for you, I asked? For a moment, he looked resigned. I never get away with it, he replied.

Back in the studio, with a canvas on the easel, I looked at the flowers for some time. Hydrangeas were emblematic of my youth, as they were planted by my parents at all the houses we lived in, most memorably at a cottage in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe where the considerable rainfall allowed them vertiginous growth. Their tight shaggy heads reminded me of old fashioned bathing caps. The best year for them was at a different house when there was a drought and we used only bath water on the garden.

Sleeping Model with Mirror, 2023, Mixed media on paper, 120 cm x 150 cm.

My phone rang suddenly. It was an old friend who had just had a traumatic parting with his daughter at Heathrow. The daughter had decided to make a trip on her own to South Africa. With his daughter visibly upset and anxious, my friend related that the immigration official in Cape Town had offered to pray with her. The big heart of Africa. I don’t knpw another continent where the role of the business at hand is so immediately put aside to be human. Possibly not a service they offer on arrival at Heathrow, he quipped before ringing off.

I started painting and managed a few hours, the exhilaration of painting, and painting a subject close to me, and a day of suprising memories surfacing left me feeling buoyant. My friend Henry had said to call in for some supper on the way home. I related my day to him and he beamed at the thought of reconnecting with a painting from the past. He had been to a memorial service of a work colleague the day before. The colleague had also been a very successful bloodstock agent. Henry, whose knowledge of horses was worse than negligible, asked him on a busy Friday night, cheek by jowl in a tube with ears pressed around them.

I’ve noticed, Gus, that it’s mostly the female horses that compete at the Grand National, why is that? Mindful of his unbidden audience, Gus replied with economy, It’s the fences, Henry.

It is time to take my horse back through the night with some stars glinting, up winding Cotswold tracks. I think of the exhibition opening in Edinburgh in 1992, the Italian and Scottish paintings,and then the Venetian and Zimbabwean paintings at a One Man Show in London a few years later. And now with the centrifugal force of landscape spinning from the lanes in Gloucestershire and other places, the model asleep near the Blue Chair. These decades, flowers ascending and the time spent discovering. I think of the people housed between these spaces; how years and exhibitions later, I am fortunate to be lost painting in these lanes .

Bagendon, August Morning, 2023, Mixed media on paper, 120 cm x 97 cm.

This post with the invitation at the beginning serves to welcome you to attending my One Man Show in Highgate in London beginning on the 12th of June. Please be aware of the opening times stated on the invitation. I much look forward to welcoming you. If you would like to attend the Private View, I would be delighted to see you there. Perhaps you might be kind enough to RSVP to give me an idea of numbers.

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Christopher

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With just over a month before the opening of my new One Man Show, I have been hard at it arranging for posters to be printed, invitations to be prepared and delivering work to the framers, while in regular discussions with the gallery.

Recently, someone asked me: how do you select work for an exhibition? It is such a good question, and a difficult one to answer. And over the next couple of posts, I will try to give some idea of how this evolves.

Arrangements for my show at the Highgate Gallery go back three years. During this time, a lot has been going on in my life, and I’d like to share some of the backstory to throw a helpful light on the genesis of the exhibition, and the themes developing from it.

TEN, 2024, MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER, 120 CM x 105 CM

I was looking to have One Man Show in London on my return from lockdown from South Africa in 2021 with a good body of work to exhibit. I had discussed it with a commercial gallery in London and it seemed set. But a hitch appeared after nearly a year of discussions. The reason given was that because I was neither black nor a woman, they couldn’t show my work! Commercial galleries soon after COVID were beset with massive pressure to show work by artists who had struggled to show during the epidemic.

I decided to go another route: hire a gallery space. Someone recommended the space in Highgate at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute. I applied and was accepted. Even here there was a waiting list for a couple of years. We decided on a date and I selected some paintings emblematic of what I was painting by this time, and the show was going to be called “The Blue Chair and Places in Between”.

2023 was an extremely productive year for my painting. In South Africa, I had developed a series of mixed media work in landscape, still life and with figures. I was constrained by size, and returning to the UK, I fulfilled the ambition of working on a larger scale with this medium. Even now, when I look back at the amount of work I was doing at the time, I am astonished. Because they were not quick paintings to do. Landscapes was done over whole seasons. Some figure paintings took six months to resolve.

In truth, I was partly losing myself in my work to attempt to shield myself from the impending loss of the three major maternal figures in my life who were to reach the end of their time within months of one another. My birth mother in Australia, my step mother here in England and my Aunt in South Africa who had presided over all of my adult life and before, since losing my adoptive parents at a young age. We all have to go through this, but this was quite a line up!

It was a numbing sensation to think that I had sat at these maternal figures’ tables, and soon their chairs would be empty. All of them had encouraged my painting in different ways. And we were curious to think of where it had sprung from. My uncle was particularly amused by it, less so when I had brought oil paint in from the studio over an unblemished white carpet, and earned the title of “his wife’s nephew”. My step mother, the gentlest of souls, who was an art teacher in her own right,was never failing to encourage. And with my birth mother, who was the most incredulous of all at my profession-it was easier to point to my brother who we proudly told our friends is a screen writer in Hollywood.

In the course of looking for and finding my birth family, I had been indulged with a plenitude of maternal figures, spoiled even with five half sisters. This was juxtaposed to the inability to calibrate a sustained relationship with very patient girlfriends over the years. Imagining that my career would be an unattractive proposition for them, I most probably leant instead into the sense of the feminine from family to sustain that role when I wasn’t driving girlfriends boss eyed with incredulity at my inability to manage the practical basics of life.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful model who exemplified the feminine I was looking for in painting. Seeing this extraordinary blue chair in a shop called Artique where I have bought many props for the studio, I used it as a symbol not only to imagine these role models in my life, but also to use it in conjunction with the model to express something which I would struggle to put into words.

MODEL SEATED WITH SHONA SCULPTURE, 2023, MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER,120 CM X 100 CM

Painting is exactly that. It has the ability to articulate emotions, thoughts, and notions of places, people and objects that serve as a touchstone to express the inexpressible through paint. I had no way of preparing myself for what was to come, and the logical thing was to throw myself more completely into my work. At times, there will have been aspects in a painting that will have set off thoughts and memories about these three people. The blue chair itself, I did buy as a way of thinking about the impact of these peoples lives, but my thoughts were relatively inchoate, and muddled, and disheveled by grief, or anticipating its effect on me.

At the same time, I was enjoying the supreme exhileration of working on a much larger scale and allowing the paintings to bloom into a bigger space. The model, with an elegant and full femine energy and rhythm to her figure was exquisite to paint and to be able to position her in large works and explore the combination of studio interior, flowers and landscape was the opportunity I had long been waiting for. The nervous energy fuelled itself from these larger compositions exploring a combination of themes, to taking long panoramic boards into the landscape around Caudle Green gave me a ballast against what I anticipated negotiating with grief.

AUTUMN IN CAUDLE GREEN , 2023, MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER, 154 CM X 75 CM

As these vital maternal figures so central to my life disappeared from view, I found myself caught in a web of deep feeling followed by an inability to feel anything, then taken over by an increasing feeling of exhaustion and hoping that the structure of various exhibitions would prop me up while working frenetically towards them. Whether this was practical, noble or foolhardy, I couldn’t tell. I relinquished myself to the forward momentum of where I hoped this was going. Strongly aware that this was my reason, I knew that the need to show work to advantage would offer me the cues to the next steps, whatever they were.

In part, the intensive work load together with the consecutive losses of people so close to me took its toll. A year later, exhausted, pressured and trying to live up to a timetable that was beyond me, I succumbed to a major heart attack at the end of 2024.

The exhibition was scheduled for April 2025. The committee who ran the gallery showed extraordinary generosity and understanding and allowed me to secure the dates of the 12th to the 25th of June in 2026.

This has allowed me time to recover strength and to start work again. By now I have a number of series of paintings to choose from. It’s only with hindsight that one can begin to see the implications of what the past brings to the present,and might anticipate in the future.

Some of you may have followed the development of a series of Lane landscapes which I have been doing in the past year. I’m planning to include a small group of these. Most noticeably, I have sensed a shift in palette. Much of my concentration has been on flower paintings and the landscape,and I will continue with those, but I am much looking forward too to returning to painting the figure.

And there are also the very difficult decisions involved of leaving paintings out which I would most like to include. This I can tackle in the next newsletter. But I will leave you with some images of paintings from this time. And I hope they may bring you to the exhibition, and or to the studio if they are not exhibited. All the work is for sale. Please do enquire here or email me on christopher.johnson215@gmail.com

CORONATION, 2023, MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER, 150 CM X120 CM

I probably havent even begun to answer the question which motivated this post.but the the complex backstory going back some years might offer some explanation for delays and dimensions which may relate to the show. I hope you will forgive me! I will write more specifically about the actual process of selection in a pre exhibition post.

THE LANE, JANUARY, 2026, ACRYLIC TEMPERA ON CANVAS, 60 CM X 50 CM.

Again, my sincere and grateful thanks to those of you who recently became paying subscribers. I am still in that place where I feel faintly uncomfortable pickpocketing people’s wallets for this. But the encouragement as well as the financial boost is immense, and helps to fill the spaces uncovered by not being able to exhibit for nearly two years. A huge and welcome thanks to you. Please feel comfortable to comment if you feel moved to. Invitations for the show will be going out imminently. If you have any queries, don’t hesitate to ask. I hope this finds you well.

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The Cornfield (1826), John Constable, The National Gallery (Public Domain)

Despite making two trips to London recently to assess the space for where I will be exhibiting in June, I seem to have missed the bus to Tate Britain where the Turner Constable exhibition was showing. I wonder how people’s opinions have changed or been reinforced by it? Now as an outsider to the event, here are my thoughts on both painters ; throughout my time of painting in the landscape, both painters continues to influence me.

I leave the lane I have been painting, the bright high colour of spring in the sun is bouncing off new leaves. If the two painters of landscape most famous in their time and probably since then have taught us anything, it is that their personal engagement with the subject is primary. But here is another strand which might play a part in their longevity.

The contemporary American landscape painter Stanley J Lewis states that you cannot understand painting without understanding abstraction. I wonder how Turner and Constable would respond to that. Both painters,as well as being of their time, have also shown they were well ahead of it. Constable is credited with anticipating Impressionism. Turner’s late work suggests pure abstraction.

Constable’s childhood was found deep in the idyllic labyrinth of life along the river Stour in Suffolk. His painting draws from this with an affection elegantly avoiding sentimentality, despite the best efforts of marketing executives for chocolate boxes. Though this marketing exercise bringing an awareness of his work in a cosmetic sense has probably interfered with our being able to look at it without prejudice.

1799 portrait of John Constable by Ramsay Richard Reinagle, (Public domain)

Rather than locating the map of the first deck with the hazelnut supreme, Constable’s observations were not only specific and regional, but something in their scrutiny and interpretation transformed the talismans of his childhood into the nature we all understand and reach for at our fingertips. The paintings can summon our past in his presence.

They are durable, with a fixity like tree trunks. And painters as recently as Lucien Freud whose incisive and biological scrutiny of human form drew great strength from looking at Constable’s work. But they had tremendous range of vision and application as well.

I can still remember my astonishment at seeing the large drafts for the major paintings at the V and A, the fury and bristling energy of a Franz Kline darting across a six foot canvas. And these against the backdrop of a life full of paradox.

Despite being able to reach easily in the nourishing well of a happy childhood, much in his adult life was out of reach. Recognition came late, and his great love for his wife, Maria Bicknell, after a long courtship was cut tragically short by her early death, leaving him seven children under the age of eleven to care for. He doted on them. And continued to produce transcendant English landscapes.

Turner, on the other hand, smacked life in the chops from the banks of the Thames, and didn’t wait to be smacked back. Carried on the nations wave of seafaring greatness, he surfed and dived for the gold that raw experience can produce and distill.

His was a magnificent, tireless, bear hug of life, grabbing each experience and moving on fast to the next. His enjoyment of the sensation of speed. He was was a jockey with out a cap , a racing driver without protective clothing, exhilarating in the raw sensation of nature covering himself in a sunset or a storm.

Lake Lucerne; the Bay of Uri from above Brunnen (1844), William Turner, Tate Britain (Public Domain)

If Constable went deep, Turner went abroad. His European campaigns through Switzerland and Italy swagger through each challenge undaunted. Many painters reach their Waterloo in Venice.

Turner opened up a brand new chapter in the history of painting. He roared through sketchbooks traveling in a gondola. Here the breadth of space, colour and reflection bouncing off lagoon, canals and palazzo, unleashed the fishing net of pure abstraction.

William Turner, self portrait, circa 1799 (Public Domain)

In fairness, they had in other locations too. That space was always within him. It is not a matter of choosing between Turner and Constable. They jostle together, at times uncomfortably with each other as they did in life. They map the warring regional boundaries of place and spirit in English sensibility. The stillness and the restlessness - two great figures whose work between them gave us Impressionism and Pure Abstraction. Their influence colonized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And we are still indebdted to them today.

My office in the lane, 2026

I think of this as I return to the lane. Constable would patrol the details and trace his experience of living in it. Perhaps Turner would wait for the turn of the day, a blazing sunrise, the mist being bitten off and the valley appearing. Stanley J lewis would make a marvelous construction to allow him to sit practically in the road but avoid the traffic. What would Bomberg, Ivon Hitchens, Matthew Smith all do? All of us, in some way are affected by these two giants.

The current obsession of having to chose in an age obsessed with binary choices makes little sense here, as much as we are tempted to. Constable and Turner are two sides of the coin in a golden age of English Landscape painting. In the lottery of landscape painting, I’m waiting for them to fly tip their nuggets and ducats into the lane.I don’t want to miss that.

Early Morning Mists, Spring, The Lane, 2026.

From the 12th to the 25th of June, I am at the Highgate Gallery, HSLI, Pond Square, Highgate, London in a One Man Show titled “The Blue Chair and the Places In Between.”

More information in forthcoming newsletters.

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Red Amaryllis in Lamplight, 2026, Mixed media on paper, 70 cm x 100 cm

I made my first trip to London in 18 months last week. Between appointments to see the gallery in Highgate where I am having my One Man Show in June, I stole into the National Gallery for half an hour.

It made me think of a painter who I apprenticed myself to after University who had studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London before returning to Rhodesia in the 1950’s. Many decades later he went back to visit the National Gallery. He told me how he could not push back the tears on seeing paintings whose memory greeted him like old friends. He was so vulnerable about it, any hint of affectation was removed.

My interlude was a mere 18 months and I could feel a cold sweat looking at the Old Masters. If an there was an emotional reconnection again after the short absence so heaven help the Thames after a longer break. This was punctuated by jostling with a very determined Asian matriarch whose husband wore the same elegant look of exhaustion perfected by John Le Mesurier, as he tried without success to avoid including me with her in each photo. She, beaming with a hint of annoyance, and my pate doubling up as another sunflower in Van Gogh’s masterwork. Gifts to the East.

Study for White Amaryllis, 2026, Oil on paper, 56 cm x 75 cm

Since late in February, I have been immersed in painting a series of Amaryllis in the studio. The deep burgundies and now the soft pearlescent whites, the generous, sensuous shapes and shadows in between.

Already it is the Easter weekend and my exhibition opens in three months time. I expect some of the canvases will still be wet and some of the less wary visitors will be displaying parts of them as they exit into the warm June sunshine in Pond Square before a trip to the drycleaners. So much more straightforward just to buy the painting.

Red Amaryllis, 2026, Oil on Linen, 100 cm x 70 cm

I am waiting to start painting in the lane again with oils. The buds are here and we are at that in between time before the tree cover bustles the landscape out of view. There is enough wind at the moment to see the entire architecture of easel , tables, canvas and turps topple over with the palette onto innocent passers by with curious pets and children.

On seeing my latex gloves helping avoid getting some of the paint on me, dogs fold their ears flat behind their skulls and their tails flatter still between their hinds. Children experiment with the tubes on the dogs. April is the cruelest month, but profitable for paint removers.

Light on White Amaryllis, 2026, Oil on Linen, 80 cm x 100cm

And just when I imagined the dry cleaners would be getting less work from me, the compulsion with oil paint is not to draw back but to push forward with the sculptural quality that I love and associate with the medium. For the time being,I continue to work with mixed media in the lane. Spring is here, the lambs are dotted like specs of cotton wool in the fields. My London Show at the Highgate Gallery opens on the 12th of June. More details for that in the next newsletter. For now a very Happy Easter to you all, from the lane and myself.

Spring Lane, 2026, Mixed media on paper, 40cm x 30 cm

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As I am to all of you who continue to read and look at my work. A very Happy Easter to you all.

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A Foggy Day (Lane Series) 2025, Acrylic tempera on Watercolour Paper, 40 cm x 50 cm (Private collection)

Dear Readers,

After months, perhaps years of promising I will stop firing off emails like an agitated Cossack and that I will instead, find a less haphazard, more consistent approach, the time has arrived. In the spirit of drunken Mexicans dancing a rumba at a bull fight, the claxon of dozing trumpeters announce I shall now be posting monthly on Substack.

Substack offers many wonderful facilities. As a seasoned pickpocket, I can offer you the conscience clearing opportunity of supporting me, if you so choose, in my drive to write for you on a monthly basis by subscribing to my posts for eight pounds a month. Less than a belly quivering latte and croissant from your favourite coffee house, and more chilled than a warm white from The Royal Oak. With all three options being largely indigestible.

Some readers have said that they enjoy my writing perhaps more than my art. Others have said that they enjoy neither and that their eyes have grown tired of moving like hot molecules across the page looking for the unsubscribe button. Substack even offers a way out for those demented and battle weary souls.

Christmas Flowers 2025, Oil on canvas, 60 cm x 50 cm (Available)

For the past months of re upholstery on my person, I am now ready for work. Bolstered with stents and new vision, the lean lines of landscape which summon me to painting the Lane near to where I live seems to persist. For what started as some innocent test to trick me back into painting again after a heart attack, it has become an armature. Around it, I am building this hill of experience again.

The most reassuring aspect of it is each time that I start a painting, I genuinely feel I don’t know what I am doing. This is the best way way to proceed as if we start anew each time. This anointing of perpetual rediscovery is one of the greatest gifts of a recovery. Seeing things anew, without prejudice, but with excitement.

The professionals will tell me I am travelling a well worn course, and if the past year has allowed me to recover some strength and function again, it feels like the even greater challenges of rearranging perspective and understanding an appreciation of what is important has come into view. As broadly in life, and also as specifically in painting, standing on a hill and grappling with the basics. But with a regenerated sense of wonder and enthusiasm.

Sunflowers with Caudle Green 2023, Mixed Media on Paper, 120cm x 90 cm, (Private Collection)

Whether this is about the road travelling with trees linked by branches overhead or the proud announcement of flowers opening up to the world, the subjects are bewilderingly wonderful. I love what Robert Hughes wrote about Frank Auerbach, the German born British painter who died recently.

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt” and then something about perfect confidence being the consolation prize for the less talented!

I believe that awe and doubt are closely linked. And with it, the beauty in this world so often brings us literally and metaphorically to our knees. How it has arrived in front of us, and a daily impossible task as painters to attempt to make sense of it. It is as impossible it is as compelling. At least as compelling as the lane I have been painting. At least as compelling as the people we love, and love us despite ourselves.

Painting in the lane

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Her son leant back from the dinner table and said , “We don’t have any forebears of interest in our family except for one perhaps, the man who designed the safety features on the Titanic”.

His mother looked across at him, and with a stare that would right the listing ship, said, “That’s not exactly fair.” It’s a hard one to live down. In fact, they have an impressive lineage despite the aforementioned designer.

The fire was lit next door in the library and we gathered there after supper and listened to two singers, deftly weaving their voices around and above the guitar played by the son. It was a perfect evening, warm with kind company and the cat moving between us, exceptional cooking, the plumbline of humour and gravity in a right measure with the conversation; it echoed itself in the atmosphere and the setting, a converted Cotswold barn adapted some sixty years ago.

Later, I drove home along the ridge of the hills, the headlights picking up the march of autumnal colour as the season advances to the bridge of winter. I am always looking for the place which makes a painting, whatever that is. There is no checklist. It tends to work like the dinner party I had just attended. The elements of chance and surprise must be allowed to play their part. I return to my open fire at home and revive it with a few logs sheltering to the left of the fireplace.

A fireplace has been a central part of my youth and adulthood, even though I grew up in a warm climate. And now more than ever, I remember my parents around ours, my father deep in his chair exhausted from the day and reading a book, his sliver tankard filled with a combustible homebrewed beer next to him. My mother with her head slightly tilted to the side, almost listening to the prose lifting from the pages of hers. And the cat, stretched into the fireplace, miraculously avoiding the open fire and muttering dreams.

I would have been out for a walk during the day and drawing in a sketch pad, and the evening would be a time to look through them, and then at the books of painters I was beckoned to. At the time, I had never imagined leaving the country I had grown up in to live and work somewhere else. Everything I wanted for and loved was found there, tangibly and unquestioningly intact. But history is restless for change, whatever patterns it chooses to play out, or if it wishes to divert us away from the old to somewhere new.

For the past year, the fireplace in my house has been a constant companion. I have learned how to use it to keep the otherwise unheated house warm. Some friends have been unfailingly generous ensuring that I am stocked up with wood. The cat would not approve of this fireplace. There is not enough room for it to stretch around the burning logs. I will miss it. My landlady called round some evenings ago, and gently explained she needs it back in a years time.

In the evenings, I bring back my paintings done in the landscape from the day. I light the fire and prepare supper and collapse like my father would have done, and tilt my head like my mother would do reading her book looking at my paintings ; and I see if they speak to me. And somewhere in the flames, the cat who I was never able to say good bye to, stretches and mutters in my dreams.

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Near Woodmancote, 2025, Watercolour on paper, 40 cm x 50 cm

I woke up in a panic, clutching my tackle and my left ear. The dream or nightmare could have been true. The surgeon smiling weakly at the end of my bed. What a relief that the cardiac nurse had spotted the discrepancy and that I had not gone into hospital for a procedure detailed for another Mr Johnson.

And of course the sheer embarrassment of my surname if I was living in America and if the potentially unfortunate result had happened to me there. In my naivety while still in my twenties, I remember puzzling over a brilliantly delivered line in a film where the lovestruck hero was cautioned by an angry older man in a lift over an apparently flawed decision involving two girls. His choice had been governed by his id more than anything above his belt.

“Boy, you’re thinking with your Johnson.”.

It’s very difficult to discern which item in particular has been governing decisions on the national and international stage. As such, the consolations of art and literature couldn’t be more necessary . One of the great pleasures of recuperation is managing a shift in focus. Allowing myself the time to be reintroduced to the books I have collected for decades, I have basked in forgotten worlds now within easy reach .

At this time of the year in times gone by, I am reminded on my phone by Messrs Google that I am normally spending time in Greece. I can think of few better settings in which to paint and read and pluck at the low hanging fruit ripened by the sun. Before long, I hope to get there, and other places where friends have generously invited me.

Yesterday I drove back in the afternoon from seeing my gallery in Stow on the Wold. I marvelled at how extraordinary and beautiful the Cotswolds are at this time of year. I deliberately spun a curved route to travel down an ancient Roman way . The young driver of a combine harvester had stopped the machine and was trapped by the contents of watching something on his phone, probably porn, and so little changes since Roman times in these thickly wooded hillsides and the harvesting hillbillies and centurions of Cirencester.

Slowly, I’m gathering landscape work towards exhibitions. And with it, ideas for teaching courses on landscape painting. One of the great teachers from the last century who influenced a whole generation of painters from America and in turn Europe and Britain, was Hans Hoffman. A superlative colourist, he famously invented the theory “push and pull”.One of his pupils,Wolf Kahn tries to explain it in a book I am reading by him now. The truth is,I don’t think anyone really understood it. But it mesmerized them and his students went on to produce some of the most vital work done anywhere in the past 80 years.

The holidays have arrived. If people are not setting out on adventures to foreign lands, they are drawing much needed strength and love by returning to their family homes to build up depleted reserves. After winding my way past a Roman villa and filling up with fuel, my phone rings. A dear friend who I met in Turkey has nearly finished her Master’s Degree in Psychology in Switzerland.

An achievement of heroic proportions later in life against the backdrop of a complicated family situation, she tells me she is testing her dream to travel out on her own in a camper van to an unknown destination for a fortnight in August. Her laughter on the end of the phone reminds me of our talking intensely about any subject for a week at a juice retreat in Turkey.

Pushed and pulled by life, she is on her way.

And not thinking with her Johnson.

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Anniversaries can have such mixed feelings . I would never have expected this one to appear with such relief and gratitude, and with an unexpected twist to it. Literally a year ago, I was lying in bed, on my own in the house at two o’clock in the morning, in the midst of having a heart attack. As it began, an email came through on my phone. It was from a celebrated Zimbabwean writer in New York who I had recently met at a book launch for his latest book. He was interested to buy some paintings. Anticipating what was going to happen to me, I replied, but without mentioning my current situation.

As the heart attack got underway, I was eventually forced to call an ambulance as the pain made it obvious that I wouldn’t be able to drive myself to hospital. Around four o’clock another message came through. This time it was my friend Anthony, who as a Samaritan keeps curious hours to help people in the waking hours of their distress. He was suggesting we meet for coffee later that day.

I replied, “Anthony, I’m terribly sorry, I would love to but I’m in the middle of having a heart attack and I’m waiting for an ambulance to take me to hospital”. And so an extraordinary year got underway until it ramped itself up last night on the eve of this event, a year later.

I am writing a message to Anthony and his wife Lesley , who I know are about to board a ship in New York on their way home to Gloucestershire . Passing on some news, I was curious to know if the Literary Convention on the ship, with a host of eminent authors giving talks on their books, was underway.

Photos, a copy of another message, and the reply came through. Indeed the talks had started, and did I know of a famous Zimbabwean writer who had given some excellent talks already and they mentioned his name?

Well, yes, I do happen to know him, Anthony. And the two of you, I go on to tell him, share the oblique connection of the two people who communicated with me a year ago in the middle of my having a heart attack, and now are on the same ship crossing the Atlantic. Lesley replies now , suggesting they meet for a drink. I email the author but before he has a chance to reply, Anthony has already bumped into him.

The world is a small place, even on ships crossing the Atlantic. So if you are looking for that Christmas present, an acclaimed and beautifully written book by Peter Godwin called “Exit Wounds” is the answer.

Advent, that season of waiting comes before Christmas. In the Parish where I attend the beat of life’s minims and milestones, our Vicar has also, and will this surprise you, had a heart attack some months ago. His normal dynamism was arrested by some pain, but he carried on his punishing work schedule for two days until two us forced him to go to hospital. We were right. He was given six stents and entered medical history for fortitude and the sheer resilience of survival against the odds.

I saw him yesterday. He has been signed off from the doctors, nearly lost two stone and has recovered his Duracell batteries. He tells me the children of the Parish are decorating the Christmas tree that afternoon in the church. I can just imagine the joyful bedlam , which as head child, he will be leading. Though it all, he manages with a natural, unforced brilliance, to carry the weight of being an adult combined with the lightness of remembering what it is to be a child.

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January Evening, The Lane, 2026, Acrylic tempera on canvas, 40 cm x 40 cm

Somehow , a painting starts and a painting finishes. The life that happens to the painting in between those events and life engaging with the painter are two films running at once with variable time lines. The painter struggles to direct both films simultaneously. It can be difficult to tell who wins, if anyone does, or if it is even about winning, until much later, most often.

I wonder how it would be if I had paid more attention to the advice given to me at art school by those who were more experienced than I was. I deliberately ignored them because I believed I knew better. It’s important to do that at times otherwise it is easy to be smothered by the well intentioned, well meaning people who will always have their opinions. One of them was my Uncle. Thank God I didn’t listen to him. He was a very wealthy man and didn’t leave me a bean, but perhaps gave me something more valuable - knowing when to dig one’s heels in. We viewed each other with an amused suspicion. I felt like I was on track when he was seen walking away from me shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Sometimes a few words did come out. They weren’t always polite.

Politeness is generally the enemy of art. That doesn’t mean vulgarity is it’s friend. But the truth can be raw and lies can be polished. You have to choose your own standpoint and balance. Juggling with this makes the composition have a trigger and tension that keeps it alive. And it can take a long time to learn things basic to the pursuit of Painting. If you are lucky, they might have crept up to you and tapped you on your shoulder in your sixties. But there are no guarantees.

Since September of last year, I have embarked on what have unintentionally become a series of landscapes of a lane. It goes like this, I park erratically on the side of the lane and set up my paraphernalia. There’s quite a lot of stuff. And then occasionally a car or van or sheep farmer will attempt to get past me, hopefully without knocking me flying. I expect the temptation to do so is quite strong for some of them.

So far through late summer, autumn and now winter, I have pursued putting onto paper and canvas with brushes the experience, the sensations I get from being in the landscape. Doing this gives me a heightened sense of being alive. I am not referring to the passing traffic. But the sheer exhilaration of making a series of complex decisions and watching their implications appear in front of me. Emotions range from joy and surprise to where the needle tends to point more often at disgust, self contempt and despair and more than you would imagine. But it is a compulsion and sometimes, persistence, taking risks and making the decisions that would annoy my uncle can pay off.

And the same in the studio. The interiors or paintings of flowers go through the same preamble. There is no straight line. The important decisions can take months of looking at the painting before taking the decision to make a subtle or radical change. The two flower Paintings here are each a case in point. Over months, they arrive. The two films running simultaneously intersect.

Another intersection took place recently. A great privilege of being an adoptee was finding my family thirty years ago. I was able to put a neice in touch with my birth sister and her family in Melbourne. They have been watching the tennis together. The connection, these two films running together have my eyes shining. The gift of making these connections in art and in life are great joys when they happen. And exceed our troubles. From a brief gap in the clouds, we can see my uncle has been caught off guard, dancing.

The Lane, January 2026, Acrylic tempera on canvas, 60 cm x 50 cm

Christmas Flowers, 2025, Oil on canvas, 60cm x 40 cm

Flowers in a white vase, 2026, oil on linen, 70 cm x 50 cm

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