I’ve been very busy in the studio lately, as I always am when ever an exhibition is on the horizon! From Friday 29th November through to Sunday 1st December five studios here in Dersingham will be open to the public as part of the Dersingham Christmas Art Trail. One of those studios will be mine, so I hope you can call in and say hello.

I’ll be posting some of those new paintings here in the next few days, but I thought I’d start by showing you this scene, which was featured on the cover of the Dersingham Data magazine. The Data is a little A5 handbook that contains lots of information about the village, including parish council members, groups that meet regularly, doctors surgery details, all that sort of handy information, published twice a year. It is edited by my good friend Tony Bubb, who asked me to provide something for the cover of the autumn edition.

The brief was “it must be Dersingham, but not the church or anything else that’s been done before!” One afternoon I went for a walk round the village, armed with my camera, and pausing at the Tithe Barn in Manor Rd. I had just decided that it was a rather uninteresting looking building when two cyclists came along. A composition immediately occurred to me, and I just managed to catch one cyclist with my camera as they zoomed past. A bit of artist’s license and you see the result here. Painted quite quickly to keep it feeling free, in my “traditional” watercolour palette of ultramarine blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna and light red.