Home is where the art is

Very quick blog update this. Only a couple of posts ago, I was trying to alert as many of you as possible to the beautiful art of Peter Ray Billington. Much of what I would like to say about his work, I said there - so if you didn't see it before, please go and have a look now.

Why the update? Well, one extremely exciting reason, for me at least. Mrs Specs and I did the necessary sums and worked out that we had the budget to buy one of P's pictures. Around the same time, P had posted a couple of pen and ink pictures from his archives, and I had fallen rather in love with this one, 'Three':

To our delight, it was for sale - so we are now the proud owners waiting to take delivery. I love the giddy intricacy of this piece - the way the shading choices echo without quite repeating across the three panels, and how similar symbols appear at various points re-coloured or re-shaped. And while P works in the abstract, to me this is so much about landscape folding in on, then out of, itself; sun, cloud, sea, mountain and sky interchangeable, dreamlike. I'm so looking forward to getting lost in when it's actually up on our wall.

It's also worth considering the intensity of labour and care required for a pen and ink piece like this. Here is another one P posted around the same time, 'Magic Carpet':

I cannot imagine the patience and determination involved - having had the idea in the first place - to carry it through with such precision.

P mentioned to my amazement that the pen and ink pictures are in fact 'vintage', and the piece we have bought is a couple of decades old. This not only shows how fully formed P's talent arrived in his youth, but also how consistent his approach has remained without his ever seeming to repeat himself.

Please also feast your eyes on these two commissions that Peter has completed much more recently. Both, I think, unlock that multi-patterned mind and send him down creative avenues that dare to suggest our world (the nightlife cityscape of 'Monk', followed by the alien peaks and valleys of 'The Magic Mountain'), while remaining firmly in his.

Finally, if I'm to be any service at all, I should mention that P is still available for commissions - so please have a good look around his website, and contact him if you think he belongs on your wall as well.