Self-Portrait in Garden Acrylic

The canvas is unframed although it can be hung without a frame. A string is already attached. Alternatively it can be framed.

This acrylic painting began life as an art day for my two grand-kids, Louis and Hannah. I had 2 canvases and I tore arm holes and head holes in black refuse sacks so that the kids could use these as smocks in order that their clothes wouldn’t get ruined (which would not be massively appreciated by their mum - or my wife.) It was a great day for painting, warm and sunny. To get us moving I sat on the white plastic garden chair and got one of them to take a picture with my phone. I used this to do the quickest of sketches in paint on each canvas just so that the figure would fill most of it and when I say ‘quick’ I mean less than a minute on each one. Then it was over to the kids - with me hovering, back and forth over each, like a bee on flower tops. I liked the pictures that then emerged, great colours (one in particular) and honest. So ends chapter one.

Some months later while looking at one of the pictures I got the urge to do more to it. I didn’t want to dwell on it and most certainly I didn’t want to lose its freshness or honesty by making it detailed, laboured or overworked. So the application of the paint everywhere and until I’d finished was relaxed. Which is why I am quite surprised by how ‘realistic’ in a superficial sense it turned out. The chair makes an interesting shape in my view. Its gleaming brightness and the darkness of the shadow it casts on the concrete slabs serve to convey the brightness and warmth of the light that day. And I look pretty relaxed and happy, which is precisely how it was.