Under a Thistledown Moon

With Autumn firmly at the door (and all the Christmas gingerbread in the shops) time for a bit of an autumnal painting! 

Under a Thistledown Moon 

50cm x 65cm 

Although these brambles and thistles were from a local field there is certainly a lot of homesickness and nostalgia in this painting. 

As children we loved rambling through the local lanes and picking brambles, buckets of them! When the moon was coming up we'd head home with blue tongues, covered in scratches and often with ripped clothes (those wild brambles have really mean thorns) here the nostalgia ends, I don’t know if my friends' mums made jam but mine certainly didn’t and hadn’t a clue what to do with the copious amounts of berries that I brought. I think we once managed a bramble crumble but that was about it. The cook in my family was my aunt, she was responsible for conserves, preserves and fabulous bramble wine ....... strong enough that we used to drink it out of  glasses the size of thimbles! If you could've knitted or sewn something out of brambles my mum certainly would have ...... but as it was her creativity was put to use darning the tears in my clothes. 

Let’s take a peek at my painting in close up! 

Here you get a much better view of just how many hues are involved, and you can see how my technique has evolved this year. Rather than trying to put fine lines onto impasto soft layers of pastel, which I found increasingly frustrating, you can see how I'm putting down fine lines; in the grasses for example, and then working around them. Painting takes longer but I feel I'm getting the results that I really wanted. 

Sooooo, let's welcome Autumn and hope that it has a cornucopia of motifs to offer, like these fabulous thistles and brambles.