13 x 15 x 20 cm painted lamp shade in water colour 2027
Bathers — hand-painted lampshade
I painted these women straight onto the linen, the way I paint everything else — quickly, wet, letting the wave lines and the sun find their own place. They’re my bathers, the same figures that turn up in my canvases, but here they live on something you switch on at dusk.
That’s the part I love. Unlit, it’s a drawing on cloth. Lit, the linen glows and the paint goes half-transparent, so the figures seem to float in warm water. The lamp does half the painting.
Each shade is an original, painted by hand and signed. No two are the same, and there’s no print, no repeat — the small runs and irregularities in the cloth are part of it.
It sits in a tradition I’m fond of: the Bloomsbury painters at Charleston treated lampshades, screens and crockery as surfaces worth painting properly. This is my version of that — a real painting you happen to read by
