AND ANOTHER ENDANGERED ANIMAL

Well, our first guests are still a few weeks off so I'm still painting (mainly to avoid getting stuck into the garden as Lynne keeps nagging me to do).
Here's an example of what I'm doing.

Probably the bes known of all endangered species - it could be yours.
For more details, please go to Saatchi Art online:
http://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/183452

ANOTHER ENDANGERED ANIMAL

Still waiting for summer, despite many positive signs of spring, so painting is still an option (and it's much warmer than playing petanque).

I don't know much about the red panda, except that it's listed as 'vulnerable' on the list of endangered animals.

Anyway, here's what it looks like:

More details here:

https://www.saatchiart.com/RayJohnstone

EARLY SIGNS OF SUMMER NOTWITHSTANDING...

Well, the blackbirds are making a racket in the early morning, the cranes are high overhead on their way back from Africa, the frogs are back in the pond and the weeds are on their way in the garden.
So summer must be on its way. But it's certainly not really here yet, so I'm still busying myself with playing petanque, drinking some of the wine we bought in Spain last weekend (only on weekends though because Lynne won't let me during the week) - and painting.
I'm in animal mode now, and here's my latest.

More details here:

https://www.saatchiart.com/RayJohnstone

YOUR PET HERE

This is Frankie.
He was painted from a photograph while I was on holiday in Tasmania. He was then posted in a sturdy cardboard tube (RSPCA approved) to the UK. He now hangs on a wall in Wisbeach.
If you'd like a quote on a painting of your pet (dog, cat, horse, bird, snake, lizard, frog, etc), please send me a good quality photograph and I'll get back to you with a firm quotation within a few days.
Here's a rough guide on what it'll cost: A watercolour painting on high grade 300 gram paper - size 40 x 30 cms (unframed), signed, dated and embossed - including postage and packing (in a post office approved tube), insurance and tracking details - 150 Euros. Timing, approximately 2 weeks from the date of order.
Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions.

40 SHADES OF

The world wide brouhaha surrounding the release of the movie ‘40 Shades of Gray’, got me looking again at Picasso’s series of etchings ‘Fragments de Corps de Femme’. There’s a female buttocks - executed in an economical 4 lines in the early thirties which is an unforgetable masterpiece of abstraction. Well, here’s my watercolour ‘Derriere’ - which simply means ‘bum’ or ‘butt’ in French.

Anthony Charles Lynton ‘TONY’ BLAIR 1953 — 

There’s a huge ‘warts and all’ portrait of this former UK Prime Minister in the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition. It’s by Alastair Adams and it’s overwhelming.

One of history’s political connundrum’s, Tony Blair gets full marks for being: a brilliant left wing party strategist, a Churchillian parliamentary debater, a master of the press conference, a key negotiater and peacemaker in Northern Irelandand and one of those very rare politicians who had the ability to make millions love him unconditionally. But then many astute and well advised observers say he warrents: a dunce’s hat for his porkies to Parliament — which led directly to the invasion of Iraq — and the mess the world is in today.

Anyway, I decided to hace a crack at Tony Blair’s amazing face — but on a much smaller scale.

Here it is.

ECCE HOMO

The amazing technical dexterity of the pre-raphelites has always amazed me — and, because several of them leaned towards agnosticism and even athesism, so has their choice of biblical subject matter. Their religious paintings can therefore have had only one raison d’etre: to generate the millions of pounds they so often did —  no mean feat for living artists in the late nineteenth century.

Anyway, all that aside, I thought I’d have a crack at a religious portrait. And here it is — probably subliminally influenced by Johannes Grunewald’s paingings — and available at a peppercorn price.