A regular question I get asked is - how can you bear to part with your paintings & toys, and the brutal answer is because I have to eat and pay bills, so I can't be precious about hanging on to work. But there are a few exceptions to this, such as quite a lot of my commmercial artwork. And the Bird Ladies.
Not many people have seen this batch of work I did a decade ago and I have been asked to sell them before. The answer is always a polite no - they are not for sale. Last year however, I made an exception and offered to make a copy for someone who was captivated by one of my early Bird Ladies, 'The Bird Car'. The topmost image is the 2001 piece and the middle image is the newest version - brighter than the previous one, and with a little flower in the ladys hair, to mark it out from the first.
I only finished it in the last week of 2010, hence my trip to Oxford for a frame. They are the same but different - it's rather difficult to replicate washes that were done ten years ago and light exposure changes the paper and pigment. Actually, there are three versions of this, the other was a birthday present for a friend, but alas, I have no scan to show. I'm not going to copy it again; three is quite enough and matches the amount of prongs in the bird car, which is nice and neat. The task of getting the painting to the client was an adventure in itself...
