I will begin my collection by going back twenty years to when I painted Denise through the pregnancies of our daughters Tania and Trina. Their birth dates are less than a year apart, so what I missed on one pregnancy, I caught on the other. I exhibited the entire collection of twenty-five paintings and drawings in the UK in 1998.
A visitor to the exhibition - a lady in her eighties - was pleased that I had captured the beauty that she had not dared to realise in the days of her youth. She told me that in those days the nude figure – let alone the pregnant nude - was considered shameful. Alas, my dear lady, for many it is still so!
This is one of those rare watercolours that I painted directly on the page without the guide lines of a preliminary drawing. Remember, in watercolour mistakes cannot be corrected and a successful painting – one that has avoided a thousand pitfalls along the way - is a minor miracle. But as G. K. Chesterton said, “The miraculous thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen”.
Incidentally, I had this painting in mind when I wrote my poem The Colour Black. (Search the archives for entry dated August 11th 2011)
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