The last painting - a Lautrec

My brief sojourn in 1998 into the world of paint ended with this picture. Aristide Bruant was a good friend of Lautrec. I've seen the original of this picture and I'm in a position to say that I'm pleased with my effort. I gave it to my mother.

There's a small difference between my painting and the original. In my painting the word son was deliberately omitted.

Thinking back on it, as a result of Oort Cloud blogger Clown Car's remark, I think my total output was about 6 paintings in as many weeks. One painting I remember doing was of a man called Eddie Campbell running on Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. I copied the picture from a photograph in a fell running magazine and then added a few rabbits and swallows to make it romantic. I also did a couple more French works and that really was the end. As suddenly as it had started my furious flurry of painting was over. I had come through whatever it was that I had to come through. I gave all my paintings away apart from the Degas (below) which I sold and the van Gogh (below) which I kept.

The important thing about my painting period, as I see it, was that I learnt about composition - but not in a theoretical way. I understood why painters put a dab of colour here and not there, and why lines were at this angle and not that angle, and I'm not talking about vanishing points when I say that, I'm talking about composition. And I think this knowledge is also useful when it comes to writing poetry in a Rene Magritte° kind of way.

The interesting thing I now discover on looking back was that all my paintings were of people rather than scenery and objects. It was, and is, people that interest me.

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°The painter Rene Magritte said paintings should be given poetic titles, e.g.- "An owl is a clock without hands."