‘The Hobby Horse’ 2020

Ink and acrylic on old book pages.

30 x 42 cm

Another of my Sky Arts Portrait Artist of The week portraits. This week’s sitter we had the very lovely Clare Balding Profession artist this week was Aine Divine.

As with my previous efforts at this, I spent the four hour painting stream just watching and listening. It’s always nice to see other artists at work and Aine was brilliant to watch and to listen too. It’s also great to listen to the sitter too, which really helps me, especially with the collage aspect. It’s like a little four hour getting to know you session. 

Once again I used a few screenshots of the sitter to do my version. The collage includes an old 1940’s ‘Hobby Horse’ theatre program, with a few horsey poems, a motivational self-help book which just seemed apt after watching the live stream and an Alice in Wonderland white rabbit, as a nod to Clare’s Watership Down connection ???


Original artwork and signed prints of this piece are available to purchase via my online shop.


And for anyone interested in exactly how I put this artwork together. Here’s a video of me discussing my process, my ways of working and then some very sped up video film of me completing this from start to finish.