Older work

Priest, oil on canvas

For this pre-Easter post, I'm adding some older work that I made when I lived in Cyprus. I finally scanned the photos of this work onto a CD and loaded them onto my computer. I have added them to my website too. I'm thinking to start painting portraits again, as an addition to my other work. When I lived in Cyprus, it was always a good source of income. The above portrait was painted over a week. The priest sat for me very patiently, in between seeing to funeral services! He liked the portrait so much that he ordered a second one, for his brother, though it was painted from a different angle.

The Priest with his portrait

This gives an idea of the size of the portrait.

This is part of a mural I made for a tavern. The owner wanted me to paint both walls of a corridor, which were roughly 30 foot by 9 foot high. On this wall I painted an image that showed a tavern. Half of the painting shows a man approaching the tavern in daylight, smartly dressed and ready to meet  his friends.

My Mural

 The other half shows him leaving at night, dishevelled and drunk. His wife is waiting at their house nearby, with a stick in her hand. This is what the tavern owner asked me to paint and her customers loved it, saying it reminded them of their wives! It took me about 5 days to paint, using housepaint. I invented the picture as I went along. Here is the night part: there is even a snail climbing up the side of the painting.

My Mural

On the other side of the corridor, I painted a scene of Cypriot houses:

The Second Mural

I completed literally hundreds of portraits and various commissions during my time in Cyprus. I love working large like this; it's when I feel most myself and that I have the freedom to spill out all my imagery without restrictions. The sad thing is that these murals are probably not in existence any more, because the building seems to have been renovated and I am sure they painted the corridors with something else.