Blast from The Past

'Mother and Child' 29"x24" Oil on canvas

Well, I was surprised when this painting popped up on the BBC... the very first painting that I ever sold!

I painted it in 1988 just after leaving art school and sold it to Leicestershire County Council in the UK for the grand sum of £160 the following year. I was pleased to have a painting in a public collection, although I felt it was too cheap a price... but the money was really handy at the time.

I remember the sitters were a pair of New Zealanders that I knew back then in Oxford. The mother was a carpenter who owned a bright yellow high-topped Bedford van, but the mists of time are drifting in to cloud everything else.

Looking back at it with hindsight it has a few issues, but honestly I never expected to see it again... I imagined it to be lost in some back room storage facility (à la 'Raiders of The Lost Ark').