Spring 2025 sees my artwork in thousands of homes

When spring arrives next year, I’m overjoyed to think that thousands of people will be viewing my artwork in their homes and offices.

My painting “Springtime in Wrea Green” not only got the thumbs up from the judging panel of the “Lancashire Artist of the Year 2024” competition, it was also chosen in the public vote as one of the best 12 to get into the county council’s official calendar for 2025.

It all started way back in the first half of this year when Lancashire County Council asked artists to submit works depicting scenes in Lancashire in one of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn or winter.

In mid-June all the entries went before a judging panel who then picked their favourite 8 from each season and I was delighted that “Springtime in Wrea Green” was in that group.

From mid-July until early August the 32 shortlisted artworks went into the online voting process where the public were asked to select their favourites from each season. When those votes were tallied up the three pictures from each of the four seasons with the most votes became the final 12 images for Lancashire County Council's calendar for 2025.

Although the final twelve artists were told the good news shortly after voting closed, it was nearly 2 months before we could tell anyone as the results were embargoed until they were officially announced at an awards ceremony on October 2nd.

Now the results are in the public domain and the calendars are at the printers, I’ll turn the clock back to the time when I began thinking about what to submit for the competition.

There are a myriad of iconic, picturesque, or typical Lancashire places to choose from, especially when the only criteria was that the image had to be somewhere in Lancashire, landscape-shape (i.e. not portrait or square) to fit the calendar, and it had to reflect one of the four seasons.

However, as I looked through various possible scenes it became more and more obvious that most buildings don’t reflect the seasons as well as the flora and fauna do. I therefore wanted to reject pictures of Lancashire buildings even though they were the most instantly recognisable images of the county.

I then reversed my search for possible scenes or locations by thinking about what reflects each of the seasons. Autumn and winter are probably the seasons with the most distinct colours and changes. Just think of autumn’s incredible reds, golds and browns as they melt into the cold colours of icy, snowy winters.

I love autumn colours (as you can see in my current piece in the SCA Autumn Open exhibition) and I have always been fascinated by drawing or painting snow (as you can see in my current piece in the Southport Palette Club Invitation exhibition) so that was the half of the year that I was first drawn to.

However, my two favourite colours are yellow and purple and I always think of the bright yellow daffodils as heralding the end of cold winter days and the arrival of sunshine promising a gloriously hot summer to come. Not only is yellow a favourite colour of mine, daffodils are a favourite flower. But daffodils are Welsh, not Lancastrian, so I dismissed the thought and carried on looking.

I tried out different images but nothing ticked all the boxes apart from this painting that I did do of Rufford Old Hall under a blanket of snow. I was pleased with the way that had come out – which is why it’s in the Palette Club Invitation exhibition.

For this particular competition it not only had to be an image of a place in Lancashire in one of the four seasons but, because it is for a calendar, it also had to be the sort of image that thousands of people are going to be happy to be looking at for a whole month.

Somehow my thoughts kept going back to the bright colours of spring, especially daffodils, so I kept looking through my photo collections.

Then I found some photos of a village green with loads of daffodils! It screamed: “spring!” but where was it? I hadn’t put a location on the images but I’d been there on a trip around the Preston area so it had to be in the red rose county. Success!!!

Research confirmed it’s location was Wrea Green and I soon saw that everyone photographs the village green, which is the biggest in Lancashire, and the star of that scene is the duck pond. It’s known locally as “The Dub” which, it is said, comes from the word “daub” which the locals would have dug up to plaster the walls of their homes with, hence the very large duckpond!

Wrea Green is a picturesque village all year round (it’s won the county’s best kept village title numerous times) but when I’ve seen it in springtime its iconic duck pond on its equally iconic village green is ringed with a golden necklace of bobbing daffodils.

Thus, when I thought about the ideal image of Lancashire in spring, it just had to be “Springtime in Wrea Green”.

With image selected, the next question was: what medium? There was no restriction on medium or size, but in order to give a blast of bright spring colour it had to be oils or acrylics. Time was ticking away so I went for the faster-drying acrylics on stretched canvas.

I really loved creating this painting. It’s an amalgamation of 3 photos of the village in the background and the duckpond in the foreground but in comments from Wrea Green residents during the voting process, I’ve created a recognisable image of the village.

Compositionally it worked well. The sky and background village buildings fill up the top horizontal third, the village green and The Dub pond are in the middle third, while the spring flowers take centre stage in the foreground. The curve around those foreground flowers and into the curve of the pond behind it happily leads the viewer’s eye into the picture and the line created by the reflection of the church then takes the eye up and along the row of buildings into the centre of the village.

In the painting, the buildings in the background are not as tall as the clumps of daffodils in the foreground which in reality would not be the case. This is a compositional technique used to create depth and perspective in the scene. The viewer unconsciously knows and accepts that stood in front of the pond the daffodils would appear taller whereas if one reversed positions and was stood by the buildings looking at the clumps of daffodils in the distance, they would appear much smaller.

With the pond being ringed with daffodils, I got a second chance to create perspective: I painted the clumps on the far side of the pond both much smaller and far less detailed than those right at the front to push the former into the distance. In fact, with some of the daffodils closest to the viewer I actually painted their individual trumpets and petals. Using liberal amounts of very thick yellow paint, it does give a sort of 3D effect when you look closely at the front row.

The bright blue sky colours get reflected in the pond and create a vibrant contrast with the yellow flowers. Overall it’s a colourful and happy scene that easily fits the brief of somewhere in Lancashire in one of the seasons and it’s the sort of picture that thousands will be happy to look at. The competition organisers decided to put it as the picture for April, so that also covers the Easter holiday.

I am also delighted that a few months later people will be admiring the September image “Autumn in the Trough of Bowland” which is painted by one of my wonderful tutored class art students, Janice Hobson. We both received our certificates and complementary calendars at Lancashire Archives.

The calendars for 2025 will be on sale in libraries, museums and archives. Proceeds from the sale of the calendars will go towards activities to support Lancashire Care Leavers.