The last of Summer's blues

New small paintings for the equinox

Hello friends

I’m excited to share a new series of small paintings The Last of Summer’s Blues, that have accompanied me along the way throughout this Summer in my studio.

If you’re a regular reader of The Life Boat you’ll know how much I have been thinking about the colour blue lately. As I wrote in a recent post:

Blue slips through our fingers. Like the horizon, it retreats as we approach. ‘Blue’. Say it aloud. Feel how the word itself bursts out of the mouth, follows the breath outwards and is gone.

The blues of Summer are slipping through our fingers in the northern hemisphere now, rapidly giving way to the softer tones of Autumn as we pass the Equinox.

“Summer Sea” 2025, Acrylic and brass leaf on cradled board, framed in light oak, 28.5cm x 33 cm (10 in x 12 in) £350 + P&P

So it’s time to share these little paintings. Born in the long daylight of Summer, they are lit up by the dance of sunlight on water, salt spray and summer sea fog.

“Sunlight” 2025, Acrylic and brass leaf on cradled board, framed in light oak, 28.5 cm x 33 cm (10 in x 12 in) £350 + P&P

I’m trying to respond to a kind of energy in the natural world around me, a frequency that might be the oscillations of light, or the waves on the sea, or the grass shivering in the wind, or my own fizzing nervous system. Because these paintings are as much abut the act of perceiving as what is perceived: the faint floaters that drift in my eyeball, the jitters of attention-distraction, the anxiety that intercuts the delight of being outside in the wind and light.

"“Gloup” 2025, Acrylic on cradled board, framed in light oak, 28.5 cm x 33 cm (10 in x 12 in) £350 + P&P

These paintings are a series of attempts, little essays on summer blue, on sea light, on wide skies, on deep rockpools, on soft cloud and on a sense of being immersed in something alive and vast. I hope you enjoy them.

The Life Raft Co-Creating Community

You are warmly welcomed to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week (when I remember to hit record!)

That’s all for this week!

Sam