“A Circular Journey” will be presented at my annual Open Studio in Brighton 8, 9, 10 December: an event that is part of the citywide Artist Open Houses.

“A Circular Journey” is my artist’s calendar 2024 produced in a limited edition of 50, each signed and numbered by me and available to purchase from my studio. The original works reproduced in the calendar will be exhibited in a selling exhibition in my studio along with other recent works from my travels in Japan, Croatia and Italy as well as paintings closer to home in London and Sussex.

This will be the twelfth successive year of my artist’s calendars which are a showcase for my original paintings but also combine text and image. They are conceived as separate artworks, in dialogue with my concerns as an artist and a further development of my work. I plan each year’s calendar around a particular theme. As I develop the project I think of it as an artist’s book: every detail is significant: the sequence, the titles given to the works and the text placed on the back cover that links them together.

Here is what I have written for this year:

“My journey starts in a  rose garden on a hillside above the city of Florence. Hidden behind me is a Japanese garden, gifted by the city of Kyoto which is twinned with Florence. 

Gardens have stirred my imagination through paintings and poetry, leading me on journeys near and far. Nature is a garden which inspires me as a gardener and artist. Vegetation growing among rocks on the sea shore of a Greek island find echoes in the gardens of Japan. June’s “A Fragile Balance” is central, revealing the tenuous relationship between ourselves and Nature in my composite photo etching where the mounds of rubbish through which a little girl walks on her way to school morph into the stepping stones of a magical English/ Japanese garden.Walking in the meditative footsteps of a Japanese philosopher in Kyoto or encircled in Boboli’s  green garden rooms in Florence, I find the serenity where all time and space become ‘a green thought in a green shade’”.