I've taken some time out from my taxidermy assemblage art over the last 18 months or so to get back to painting. In art you need to go where your inspiration takes you, and the act of painting oil on board I find cathartic.

My work is mainly inspired by nature and the Proustian concept of involuntary memory. With this in mind I've gone back my childhood, with 'Wombling free' the first painting in the gallery below.

As a kid growing up, it was hard not to fall for the charms of The Wombles on TV, and as with some of my other work I've included a Golly which, while perhaps controversial now, were such a huge part of many children's lives in the 1970s. This painting is 105cm x 122cm oil on board.

Next in the gallery below is 'Dogon and the flamingo' - 139cm x 86cm oil on board. I’ve always collected tribal art figures and the Dogon is something I've featured before - they were hand carved by African tribes two centuries ago to represent fertility. The flamingo is a bird often associated with Africa, and they are a creature I'm fascinated with - they way they look and they way they move. Truly one of nature's wonders.

Last in this trilogy is 'Fang and the Christian saint', which again is influenced by Proust's mantra 'in search of lost time', and features the ancestral Nommo inspired motif from the African Dogon Tribe. Oil on board 139cm x 86cm.

Paul Broomfield, September 2018