Woodland Souls Winter Landscape with deer is a 40 x 40 x 1.5-inch large original oil painting on canvas in Art Nouveau, impressionist, semi-abstract style. The colours are predominantly white, fawn, cream and pastel pinks, blues, lilacs and yellow. The edges are white and deep-edged, meaning no frame is needed. The painting shows two red deer, a stag and a doe, appearing out of a winter forest with the suggestion of snow and winter trees behind them. They behave in that typical way deer do when you come across them by chance: standing and looking at you curiously but tense and ready to flee. Sometimes all you have to do is blink and they will turn tail, flash their white behinds at you, and vanish into the trees that they know so much better than you do. This is a recurring theme for me to paint for the excellent reason that I see deer almost every time I go walking in Sussex or Kent, and it always thrills me to see how such a large animal can appear and disappear so easily. What I try to do when painting such a scene is to paint the background by memory alone, as that tends to be a good impression, but without too many details. Then I like to put in the deer, whom I start by painting in a traditional way, drawing on 20 years' portrait painting experience, and then partly abstracting them.
