Last Leaves

Oil on Canvas, 16 x 22 inches

Well, yes, it's a bit early for that, but I had to do a wintry one for my exhibition. Personally, I love all the seasons in our country and its mixed weather, and much as I like the sun on my back, I look forward to the frosts and crisp days of Autumn and Winter - rich fodder for us artists!

Regular readers of my Blog will know how much I love painting into the sun, especially when it's partially hidden by a tree, as here. I just loved that shadow of the beech tree on the right, with the duller coloured russet leaves in its wake and the bright orange leaves each side of it, picked out by the low Winter sun.

On another note, back into the present mid-September, I was thrilled skinny to see another fairly uncommon, beautiful moth - one of the day-flying species, a Hummingbird Hawk Moth:

It rested briefly on one of the garden chairs before jetting off like a rocket to find some more early Autumn flowers, hovering, as its name might suggest, like a Hummingbird, using its incredibly long proboscis to sip the nectar - a beautiful sight, so rarely seen. Often people have mistaken it for an actual Hummingbird, because the body of the moth is big, with black and white markings and it has orange underwings. The photo above is one I took myself a few years ago when I last saw one in the garden, but the one below shows the moth in flight, hovering over a Buddleia flower: