This one is called 'Broad Shoulders' and is a small oil on canvas I painted purely from memory. It is a depiction of my Grandad, my Mother's Father, and my enduring memory of him.
I had nothing to work with in terms of photographic references, so I literally worked this from memory and imagination.
I began with many sketched pencil lines directly onto the canvas, trying to make the shapes map the forms in my mind's eye.
He was a very quiet and private man who would often sit with his back to the room gazing out the back kitchen window or reading the paper whilst he waited for my Gran to give him his dinner as if no one else was there.
The family would all be chatting, laughing, or arguing...generally being lively and noisy, but there he would sit - an abiding and perplexing symbol of calm in a house of raucous activity.
I was still very young when he died and as I was just one of his ever-growing gang of grandkids that would converge on his house and shatter his peace and invade his privacy every weekend - I, sadly, never really got to know him properly.
All I do know about him is that he was a hard man who had a hard life working hard at hard things...and his name was Leonard.
Broad Shoulders
Oil on canvas
30cm x 40cm (private collection)
