Am at my brother’s gallery in Askham this weekend and all of next week if you can get to come over and see me! Hope to do a ‘plein air’ piece at Church Pool on the river Lowther, there’s a very Medeaesque cave there that I have painted previously. Go www.stuartbroadhurstceramics.co.uk for more on the gallery. I have my Medea drawings with me too apart from the very large ones. These were made over the past couple of months and you can see and read about them on this blog.

Here’s the piece complete and with an apple to get a sense of scale. Apologies about the quality of the image, you don’t get the definition of the mark making with the camera that I’ve got when you pull back from it which I had to do because of the scale! That’s why I’ve shared the close-ups.

This motif was a long time coming. At first I wanted to leave the central area blank or just clouds and sky to make it universal. However, Nicky from Artipeeps on Twitter who gave me this opportunity, suggested a universal central motif might work. I let this mergle away with me. Then I remembered the yellow flower, not sure what they’re called, that came from Charlie who is also collaborating on this Ovid Metamorphosis project too. He posted a wonderful photo of one that I loved. I found the same flower on a walk to our local Brungerley park.  I drew it into the border on this giant oil pastel. It occurred to me that flower represents so much, and that had the universal quality that I was looking for.

I started this very large drawing today and am really enjoying it. It seems like a very positive piece somehow after all the dark aspects of the human physche that I’ve been exploring. This comes from the children, always the children. The golden fleece was meant to protect children in the first instance. They are our treasure, our gold.

Here you can see the sketch in close-up and the marks and colours in mork detail. I was layering the pastel and pencil quite vigorously to search for the effect I wanted. I looked at some images of Picasso dead children for inspiration from a painting that I made a copy of once, ‘The Rape of the Sabine’ which I saw in London in 2010. You can learn a lot through copying a master like this. His work is complex but appears effortless.