WIP… but this painting’s nearly finished now, my first oil piece in quite a number of years. It’s been a strange kind of reunion. I usually work digitally these days (tablets, layers, quick edits, overpainting photos, composites, undo buttons… what’s not to love?), but something in me wanted to pick up a brush again and see what happened.

It was a bit tricky at first. Oils are much slower, less forgiving – once it’s down, it’s down, and I had to re-learn a few things. But once I found the rhythm, it all came back. Maybe like catching up with a messy, smelly old friend you haven’t seen in ages but still somehow know.

My main issue this time was canvas size, way too small for how I like to paint. Next time I’ll go bigger, or maybe even go back to making DIY canvases out of cardboard and sacking. Might be fun. I’d like a bit more texture to paint on than what you get from those flat, shop-bought ones.

The Gloamrats have made their way into this picture now, a group of small, damp, paper-crowned figures slinking through a rainy ginnel behind Mill Street. The whole scene’s soaked in that damp, forgotten Harrowden atmosphere I love: slick cobbles, dripping brickwork, and that eerie stillness you only get in backstreets when the rain’s coming down.

Just a few finishing touches left now, and then I’ll let it sit and dry before sharing the final piece with you fine folk. Been good to step back into this kind of making – even if the digital realm is still where I feel most at home.

Update from the excavation today! We found it the end.

We set off near the old mill site, thinking we were close, but nothing quite matched what my dad described. Some crumbling walls, but not the place where the “soot stones” were chucked down into the river. So we kept going, climbing through the woods, got feet soaked in bog water and we followed the little stream round hoping it’d lead us to something.

By the time we got near the road, I was ready to ring me dad for more clues as still no sign…

Then my mate clocked it, an old rusted industrial cart, half-drowned in a pool of stinking stagnant still water. Just above it, a proper steep banking sloping down. Looked like nothing at first, but then it hit us, this was it. This must be the spot.

We started digging and within seconds, there they were! black burnt rusted metal ball bearings, still solid after all these years. Fire-born and buried, just waiting for someone daft enough as us to come looking. We raked a fair few out and bagged them up, despite my dog being a right menace the whole time. 🤣 Then scrambled back out through the undergrowth, soaked, muddy, buzzing!

Climbing out, we saw a kids’ rope swing dangling off one of the trees. Folk still play there just like my dad did maybe 60 years ago! Past and present, swinging side by side.

Can’t wait to use these for me new art Harrowden piece I’m doing, pairing them up with the other relics I dug out from the old coal power station site. Two fire-specimens from two forgotten furnaces, coming together. Proper Harrowden stuff! The kind of material that remembers where it came from…
“The ground never forgets.”

This bank holiday I’m heading out with a friend to dig… not just into the ground, but into fire, memory, and myth. It’s part of a new Harrowden art piece, but the line between fiction and the real world is burning thin here… excuse me while we snap a little back to reality…

My dad told me about this old cotton mill where they used to chuck “soot stones” straight down a steep banking into the river, hot black lumps, ball baring size fire spat out the furnace, still crackling. There was no bother for pollution or health and safety back then. Just tip it in, let the river take it… He said him and his mates used to play on the slope, slipping down it like it were a playground in the 60’s…

We’ve managed to piece it together and found the spot on google and an old map, the actual mill has gone now but it looks like it’s still wasteland, sat by another set of abandoned mills still there. We’re going to try excavating this Saturday. If it’s anything like the “big crackleblacks” we found from the last remains of the old coal power station early this week, it might still be there, buried cinders waiting to be brought to the surface.

In Harrowden, these are called Crackleblack, industrial relics that hum with leftover heat, fossilised labour, the detritus of soot-belching machines, the history of one thousand hard shifts. I want to collect them, preserve them, build something from their smouldering silence.

There is also another personal story in this place we are going. Just across the river from the site is where my gran arrived from Ireland, a teenage girl entering the country with forged documents from her village priest. She came to work the mills, and stayed in Mill lodging in a place called “The Bleachery”. She’d send money home as Ireland was dirt poor back then and her mother had younger mouths to feed. A fire… this time not in the ground, but burning in her need to survive, to shape something better out of cotton, cinder and ash. And why I am here…

The mills and cotton run through my family, we all worked in the textiles factories including myself…

So yep… its an art piece, But it’s a bit like digging through cinders to find where I come from… An act of remembrance… An excavation of family, flame, and forgotten furnaces.

I’ll keep you folk updated and post what we find, if the land’s in a giving mood! 🖤❤️

Spent the afternoon diving into a proper painting for the first time in a long while, and back to oils, no less. Picked up a fresh canvas this morning, on a bit of a whim.

Before I moved over to digital, I used to work a lot in traditional media charcoal, ink, collage, and of course, oils. I use to love doing huge expressive paintings with a brush, but it’s just something I gradually drifted away from really, especially working day jobs where I mostly do digital art. These days I mostly use my tablet (with layers, undo buttons, over painting and all that good stuff), but it felt right today to return to something more tactile.

This piece is still a work in progress, maybe halfway through. Not gone too badly, considering half the oil paints had gone strange on me, and I was working with nothing but big daubin’ brushes.

I’ve got some new paint and brushes on the way, so once they arrive I’ll start tightening it up and bringing in more detail. I reckon there’ll be a few Gloamrats sneakin’ about in this one, possibly a cat watching from the shadows.

It’s rough, it’s unpredictable, and I’ve missed it. Just wish I had more time, it’s a much slower process.