14″ x 17″ Charcoal, pastel, acrylic on Bristol paper. View from my easel: my dungeon studio. Thinking about Joan Eardley, whose work I wasn’t aware of till someone posted some of her paintings on Facebook… just blown away by her paintings. The write ups on web pages–the kind of dismissive praise I guess you have to expect when male critics write about a woman artist. She’s so much more than a painter of ‘Scottish identity,’ and her paintings aren’t ‘expressionistic’ –just doesn’t capture the tension she creates between her sometimes minimally suggested subjects and the powerful abstract structures that govern and contain them.  They never lapse into a mere expressionist mess. There’s no need to hold their representative subjects in mind to feel the power, the pure visual power or her re-imagining them. So much of what I aspire to do.

Photo with additional work with pastel. What do you think?