Annual Art Exhibition 20th & 21st June 2015 at Elmstead Church

this exhibition is in a lovely old church with a lot of daylight flooding through the windows to light up the paintings... Whilst deciding what to choose to exhibit, I happened to read this article about renewed violence in the Darfur area of Sudan:

 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/16/why-is-the-world-blind-to-the-fresh-threat-of-genocide-in-darfur

and this made me decide to include the "Darfur Madonna" I painted a few years ago...

 ...when the plight of refugees in Darfur first began, and pictures of hundreds of women and young children were flooding the media...I found these images so moving I made a quick sketch of one of countless women queuing for food with a young child sitting atop a pitifully small bundle of their belongings ... then began the slow process of building up dozens of thin glazes of oil paint...
 a slow  meditative process
enabling me to pray whilst painting