In terms of painting it’s been a quiet time as I’ve been a little busy with the arrival of my baby daughter.

Six weeks in and we’re getting used to our new home life and I’m itching to get painting again. I dipped into a commission piece on Sunday and will continue to work on it this week in the evenings. Finding time has always been the biggest challenge and that continues so I’ve decided to set myself a week-long sketchbook challenge to get the focus back. Starting Sunday 22 May I’ll commit to three sketches a day for seven days. By the end of Saturday 28 May I’ll have 21 drawings and my hand-eye coordination and observational skills should be improved.

This arrived in the post a couple of days ago. I treated myself to Jonathan Yeo’s new book In the Flesh. I love his style of painting and it’s a lovely coffee table book to add to my growing collection of art books. It’s useful to see years worth of work together and flick through pages to see how he has developed his style. The ‘unfinished’ nature of his canvases adds an element of abstraction which I like. You can see faint outlines of the settings of the subjects so you still get an idea of where they are. I’ve seen a number of the portraits at The National Portrait Gallery so the book serves as a good reminder of them.

Visiting gallerys, looking through books and writing about painting gets the juices flowing for me so I will be heading up to my studio space in my loft for a couple of hours later on and cracking on with the latest commission of a Spitfire. Not my usual subject but good fun. Just pulling into Waterloo so I’ll finish up here and post again soon.

Thanks for reading!