New Series – SEBASTIAN - FIR GROVE GARDEN. Oil & Acrylic on Canvas, 40.0 x 51.4 cm
May 2025
A new series exploring personal, intimate moments through expressive portraiture.
Sebastian, Fir Grove Garden began with a photograph I took in a Hampshire garden in the summer of 2021. It shows my ten-month-old son seated on the grass in a soft blue denim sun hat. I was drawn to the quiet composition — his gaze off to the right, the gentle natural light and a single dandelion providing a bright, simple focal point in the foreground. A fun feature of the picture is a tiny black bug on his toe, which I kept in the final portrait.
The project was conceived as a dual portrait: I painted one canvas and then painted the second immediately afterwards to see how the two executions might diverge. Although I intended them to differ, after six days of preparation and painting, they resolved into two almost identical images. The distinctions are subtle — small shifts in facial detail, a slightly darker bodysuit on one piece, and modest variations in the stripe colours — but those little differences are precisely what I find most revealing.
This time I documented the process in greater detail: preparatory studies, small-scale colour tests, time-lapse films and narrated commentaries that walk through each stage. These recordings were made primarily for social media, but they also serve as an extended record of the decisions that shaped each canvas — from the initial sketches and marked-up compositions to the final varnish.
One decisive moment came during background testing. I prepared poster studies and colour trials at a smaller scale and ultimately rejected green: it felt heavy and opaque and didn’t reflect the mood I wanted. I settled on a warm peach–salmon ground which lifts the figure and allows the skin tones to read more clearly against the backdrop. The dandelion was adjusted from a bright yellow to a warmer orange to bring greater balance and cohesion to the composition.
More behind-the-scenes photos, studies and process films are available on my Instagram and on the blog at my website.
