Painting again

I haven’t been well for the last week or so and thus haven’t been painting. Before that I finished a portrait of William Davidson. William Davidson was born in 1781 - the illegitimate son of the Attorney General and a local black woman. At the age of 14 he travelled to Glasgow to study law. Press-ganged into the Navy he returned to Scotland and studied mathematics at Aberdeen. Before completing his studies he moved to Birmingham and became a cabinet maker. He later moved to London and following the Peterloo massacre he became interested in radical politics and began reading radical newspapers and also became interested in the works of Tom Paine. Soon he joined a Spencerian group of radicals, and not long after was part of the group of 11 radicals who were set up by a government agent to attempt the assassination of government cabinet members. The Cato Street Conspiracy. They were all subsequently captured and sentenced to death. William Davidson along with 4 other conspirators was hanged and decapitated outside Newgate Prison on May 1st 1820.

Since finishing that, I started working on a new thing, which I will reveal when I think it’s worth showing - still on the revolutionary theme but a lot different. And whilst working on that I felt the need to be working and playing with something even more different. I wanted to play with shapes, lines and colours in a different, lighter way, and this is what I came up with:

“Dare”, Oil on canvas, 90x70cm.

Durruti. Oil on canvas

Bienventura Durruti led an anarchy communist army in the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. I get the depressing impression that the Spanish Civil War is ignored and forgotten by young people which is sad. Many socialists of my parent’s’ generation- or perhaps a little older - went to Spain to fight to defend the elected left wing government from the fascist coup led by Franco and his army colleagues. A sad part of European history that served as a prequel to the Second World War, and a practice ground for Hitler who provided support for Franco, as they bombed and murdered many hundreds of thousands of innocent Spanish citizens. Many Catalans escaped from fascist Spain by climbing over the Pyrenees to safety in Catalan France. Not far from where I live. The bitterness still exists as is visible in Catalonia to this day. Durutti was executed by fascists, but remains a revolutionary hero.