I make sketches of natural forms, found objects and tiny treasures everywhere I go. Over the years on various trips abroad or just down the garden have filled over 50 books with curios, crockery, strange fruits, shoes, shells, fashions and flowers... the list goes on.

In essence, this piece took me over 10 years to paint! The idea has been ‘cooking’ for a long while, so as a result I was quite nervous of where to begin. However, you have to start somewhere.. and I started in the bottom left corner!.. (with a tiny bottle and a vintage perfume label from America.) From there I moved across the surface of the painting, referencing my sketchbooks for inspiration. It seemed appropriate to ‘catalogue’ the collected objects, so I used antique bingo cards and every object was given a number, from number 1 to number 57.

I collaged text relevant to each object, and random associations cropped up along the way, for example tassel is next to taste and ‘tart’ is on the back of the fragment of paper… which made me smile, also saucy is on the other side of scandalous, ornament is next to ornithology… oh the sad details which keep me amused!! But must just tell one more..  I was looking for a blank piece of paper from an old book, to put next to one of the bottles, tore off a corner and noticed it had the word ‘message’ written on it. ( bottle number 27).

There are always hidden secrets in my paintings.. some of which I share and some I don’t, but I will say that there is one piece in the collection which doesn’t exist.. happy hunting.. the clue is in the title!

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