As the title suggests, this painting is a celebration of my ‘New Life’, having recently moved to Haverhill (Suffolk), together with my girlfriend, Ginnie.  The painting is the second in a series of autobiographical works I am intending to make throughout the coming months that will explore the nature of our relationship, and our interaction and understanding of our new community.

The idea of a diptych had interested me for some time as a way of including more information into one work without compromising compositional elements.  I had seen a tremendous array of altarpieces during a scholarship to Florence in 2001 (and, indeed, in the National Gallery), focusing on the works of Fra Angelica and other Quattrocento painters.  More relevant to New Life, however, were Stan Spencer’s awe-inspiring murals at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere.  The structure of the piece is based on one of the side panels; a main canvas and a predella canvas framed with bare gesso to echo the plaster architrave.

The initial idea for the painting was a double portrait of Ginnie and me.  My intention with the semi-clad pose was not one of voyeurism, merely a factual account of how these paintings begin; a lazy Sunday morning spent rifling through various outfits and shoes before lunch.  I captured myself in my mahogany Chevelle mirror, set a good deal back from Ginnie.  The fact that I am very much in the background reflects my more introspective nature.  The focus is certainly on the foreground figure which is set against the more broadly treated self portrait:  From this, however, I developed the highly rendered hand to symbolize, and give importance to, the act of making.

I confess to being a cat lover, and was delighted when Spiv agreed to sit for me!  He is one of three cats we have and was a remarkably agreeable sitter.  Despite our best efforts, Spiv has a, not unusual, habit of bringing all manner of wildlife in for us.  I wanted to represent the ordinariness of this but it does by turn, give the work an air of menace, and a smattering of humour to which I am not averse.  I took inspiration form Durer’s animal drawings, and also some of Landseer’s studies of felled Deer I have in a book.

In the predella canvas, I wanted it to give some impression of where we live.  The row of Victorian worker cottages is a common site in Haverhill, built at a time when the town was a thriving success thanks to the manufacture of Drabbet Smocks.  This scene, captured with the light falling at around 11.30, is a bustling mixture of add-ons, extensions and home improvements, capturing an intimate view into peoples back gardens.  It owes an obvious debt to Vermeer’s ‘The Little Street’.  The white house to the far right is indicative of the town’s later development during the sixties.  It became a London overspill town and, in a masterful stroke of town planning, two insipid housing estates were plonked on either side of the high street, just as Dr. Beeching brought his unwieldy axe down on the train station.

It may not be Cookham, but in Haverhill in 2007, perhaps urban planning is more relevant than swan upping.