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This painting has a strange history. I’d taken a photo of a wonderful autumn scene way back in the late sixties, when we were all still using film and negatives, and as far as I know, digital cameras hadn’t been thought of. A friend and his son came to visit us recently, and I took four or five shots of young Matthew frolicking about with our new spotted poodle. I have an incredible visual memory, and seeing one of the back-lit shots of them, I thought, “That’s going to go beautifully with that shot of autumn leaves from way back”. It took me a couple of days to find that print in a cardboard box, as I have no filing system, but, as I had thought, it was perfect. I started the painting by roughing in the blurred purplish blue-grey of the background hillside. Then I indicated where the brilliant sunlight hit the grass, and then intricately ‘drew’ the shapes of the trunks and branches of those trees.


I used a brush to draw them in, not a pencil, and I was going to say I did them in black, but actually I don’t use black any more. It’s so lifeless. To create that sort of darkness I mix Pthalo blue, a really ‘fierce’ colour, with Purple Madder. You can make the resulting black-looking colour as purplish-brown, or as blue as you want it to look. It’s ‘alive’. When that stage was thoroughly dry, (as I didn’t want the yellows and oranges of the autumn leaves mixing in with the background or the tree trunks and turning everything a dirty green), I placed the crisp autumn leaves exactly. The decision as to where to put the boy and the dog was a tricky one, but I think they work where I put them, about two thirds of the way across from the left and just to the right of that bunch of gleaming leaves. Finally I used a rigger brush to hit those two figures with the gilding edge of the sunlight and the painting was finished, that is, apart from a couple of clumps of greenery at the base of two of the trees.


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