If you can’t come, then please ‘like’  me on my Facebook page which is updated almost daily.

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother” - Margaret Sanger

The most revolutionary and liberating act for women is surely the availability of The Contraceptive Pill. Before The Pill contraception was a messy, hit-and-miss, often outlawed business. Women in the Ancient World fashioned vaginal tampons from a cocktail of leaves, honey, oils or animal dung. Condoms were made from animal intestines, leather or fine linen. And Casanova favoured the use of half a lemon placed on the cervix before coitus.

It wasn’t until 1839, when Charles Goodyear first vulcanised rubber and manufactured condoms and a proto-diaphragm, that contraception became much more effective than crossing your fingers. Condoms were rightly incredibly popular. But they relied entirely on a man’s willingness to use one. Women were still fucked.

What the girls were crying out for was a simple, private, effective, 100% female-controlled method. One where you didn’t have to fiddle around with unsexy rubber or poke about with pessaries, creams and little foil packets.

By the 1930s scientists had already worked out which hormones were responsible for ovulation and how they could be inhibited. But a way of synthesising progesterone proved tricky and expensive. Pharmaceutical companies seemed reluctant to get involved with the research. It wasn’t until 1951 that hormonal contraceptive research finally began. The first clinical trials took place five years later and on this day in 1960, the US Federal Drugs Administration finally approved the first oral contraceptive. Today, an estimated one hundred 100 million women worldwide now use The Pill. In the UK a third of women of reproductive age do so.

Now, no more fannying about: let’s get real.

“Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life” - Bertrand Russell

Check out this website and study the net population growth this year number very closely. Whatever you may think of the Chinese government’s controversial one-child-policy there is no doubt that they have at least done something about the global over-population crisis that no one (least of all politicians) dares talk about. Women, armed with information and the contraceptive pill, can avert the crisis. People need education about sex, sexual health, and the benefits of small, planned families right now if Bertrand Russell’s assertion is not to come true in our lifetimes. In some places it already is: Haiti, Rwanda, Bangladesh…

“Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion” – Spike Milligan

Unbelievably there are still governments and organisations around the world who misguidedly advocate abstinence and just-say-no campaigns, while simultaneously judging and condemning girls who have babies ‘out of wedlock’ or very young. This is 1. claptrap and 2. hypocrisy. It is right and natural for young people to explore their sexuality. Irrespective of what the Bishop of Rome says, people want to shag, even if His Holiness chooses to keep his cock in his boxers. Young people especially need to be armed with: accurate information, realistic expectations, the confidence to say yes or no, and the freedom from the risk of pregnancy and disease. For girls this means using The Pill as early as she and her doctor feel able, and for lads it means understanding it’s their responsibility to say: “even if you’re on The Pill, I need to use this condom.”

For those that think that telling kids about sex early leads to early first sex, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Kids in The Netherlands who learn about sex young, delay their first sexual encounter until the age of 17.

“It needs to become as easy to get hold of a condom in a poor country as Coca-Cola” - Clare Short

Our Sisters in developing countries need special attention and support. Millions of women, many denied an education and married off shockingly young, suffer poor health, grinding poverty and early death as a result of pregnancy after pregnancy, child after child. It was once like this in the UK. The Pill – and now hormone injections too, which act in the same way – can ease this needless suffering. Combined with the use of condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS, The Pill has the power to transform entire communities.

Now, after a hard day at work or caring for their much-wanted offspring, women in developed countries can kick off their shoes, lie back and make love to their partners free from the fear of pregnancy. But remember girls, The Pill is only 99.7% effective. My daughter’s middle name is 0.3%.

People ask the most interesting questions: how do you get your ideas? where do you start? what happens during the process of painting? how long does it take? how do you know when it’s finished? I particularly enjoy the honesty of younger visitors who see things with wonder and fresh eyes and ask ‘why is it like this, why is it like that?’ Yesterday I especially fell in love with an almost four-year-old girl who shared my interests in bluebells, hares and the moon. Special kiss to her!  

My greetings cards were very popular with visitors this weekend. But don’t forget you can buy them from me right here. I’ve put some bundles of cards together for you at the very best prices I can do – including postage.

My exhibition continues next weekend – I do hope you’ll be able to visit. If you can’t, then please join me on my Facebook page which is updated almost daily.

Finally huge thanks to my nephew George and son Rupert for helping out at short notice yesterday. Young people today… they’re simply wonderful!

Badbury bluebells (acrylic on canvas, 500mm x 500mm, £235) was started yesterday and completed today. We went to see the Badbury bluebells, near Great Coxwell in Oxfordshire, last weekend and I was deeply impressed. I went there hoping they’d inspire a painting – and they did! What you can’t sense in the painting is their wonderful perfume which seemed to hang in the air. I was disappointed that other visitors to beautiful Badbury Woods failed to keep their children under control; some kids ran through the flowers unchecked and made a lot of noise. Happily I can omit such tranquillity-busting elements from my canvases!

This watercolour of a leafy seadragon (Phycodurus eques) was a commission. I’d painted one of these wondrous creatures before in a composition entitled Life on Planet Three, but I’d never painted one on its own. I especially enjoyed the combination of colours in this one.

Last day for the pine (acrylic on two canvases, 1000mm x 500mm, £285) was my first attempt at painting in acrylic en plein air, as they say in France, that is outside, directly in front of the subject. In fact, it is in France; in the garden of a cottage in Brittany where we sometimes go to stay. The trees were just bursting into leaf. The title comes from the fact that the day after I started painting, the large pine on the right was felled. It had got too big and was stealing all the light. I counted the rings – the tree was 38 years old.

The painting is made over two canvases. I figured if David Hockney can do it, then so can I.

Plumage from paradise (acrylic on canvas, 500mmx 500mm, £285) started life as a very differently; it was the face of the Green Man in a random doodled pattern of colours and lines. But after I had finished it, I wasn’t happy with it. It needed re-working. So I blocked out the face and painted a bird of paradise at the centre, making its plumage into a vibrant display.

Alas, I have run out of wallspace and my exhibition, which starts next Saturday, is already hung; so Badbury bluebells and Plumage from paradise won’t be on show. I’ll keep them handy though, in case anyone would like to see them.

So I have been ‘re-bundling’ my greetings cards in my online shop  to offer you bumper packs wherever possible.

For the ultimate bargain try this selection pack of 12 greeting cards for only £10.80 including P&P to (UK customers).

Most of my cards are suitable for any occasion and are often purchased by people seeking alternative, ‘green’ or secular designs.

I was recently encouraged to enter a competition, The Big Oxfordshire Artweeks Vote and it’s down to public voting! Will you vote for my painting?

The potential prize for you is a print of an image of your choice from a selected range. The potential prize for me is to have my picture displayed at Oxford Railway Station, and so have my painting seen – and I hope enjoyed – by lots of people. I’d like that a lot.

To vote simply go here and choose the painting you thing best represents the spirit of Oxfordshire. I hope you’ll think that’s painting number 10; my painting Towards Uffington. The ‘submit vote’ button is at the bottom of that page.

Thank you!

The rise and fall of Easter Island is a parable for our times; a warning from history of what happens when our selfish species doesn’t pay close attention to every detail of Planet Three’s precious natural resources.

On Easter Sunday 1722 Dutch sailor Jacob Roggeveen landed on a speck of volcanic land 12 miles long and 6 miles wide in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the remotest inhabited piece of land on the planet. Its nearest neighbour, Pitcairn Island, is 1,289 miles away and continental Chile is 2,100 miles away. It’s that remote.

Roggeveen was the first European to clap eyes on its then treeless shores dotted with mighty stone platforms (ahu) supporting gigantic stone statues (moai). Until that day the islanders thought their island was the whole world and they were the only people.

Archaeological, linguistic and cultural evidence suggests that the first settlers probably came from the Marquesas Islands 1,600 miles away, but nobody knows when. A vague folk-memory passed down in creation myths existed, but the true story of how they reached what they called Rapa Nui is lost in time.

What is certain is that the Polynesian settlers arrived with their stone tools, chickens, taro, sugar cane, bananas and stowaway rats to find an island paradise. When they arrived the island was thickly forested with five endemic species of land birds as well as migratory seabird colonies, the sea was heaving with fish and marine mammals and the soil was rich for verdant cultivation. Despite the lack of springs or rivers, the volcanic craters acted as reservoirs and it rained frequently enough for them never to have to worry. They’d do well here!

And so they did, for perhaps a thousand years. The islanders’ unique clan-based culture thrived and to honour their ancestors they built ahus and erected moai. These were manu – sacred – invested with deep spiritual power and ritual significance. With natural resources so freely available, they could relax and indulge their passion for carving in wood and stone. Indeed, they invested their energies in creating stone statues on an industrial scale.

The population grew to perhaps as many as 15,000 in the century before the Dutchman’s arrival. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Fish stocks dwindled. Seabird colonies were plundered until few came to nest any more. Marine mammals were hunted until none remained. Forests were cleared for cultivation, the trees used for building boats, houses and paraphernalia required to carve, move and erect statues.

When Roggeveen arrived he estimated the population of the almost treeless island at about 2,500. Something had happened in the previous hundred years. Most likely overpopulation and environmental degradation had reached a tipping point, leading to starvation and clan warfare over limited resources. Scholars are still trying to discover the precise details. What is certain is that Roggeveen’s arrival would lead to still greater catastrophe for the islanders.

Roggeveen noted the “remarkable stone figures, a good 30 feet in height”. He stayed a week; time enough to transmit one or two European diseases and kill a dozen locals. The next Europeans came in 1770, when a Spanish ship moored up. It reported seeing the statues still standing. Yet by the time Captain Cook dropped anchor just four years later, he noted that many of the moai had been toppled and the islanders were hungry and ‘wretched’. He noted the “…ratts which I believe they eat as I saw a man with some in his hand which he seem’d unwilling to part with…. Sea Birds but a few…. The Sea seems as barren of fish.”

What was happening? Perhaps the environmental degradation, combined with the arrival of Europeans had somehow signalled that the ancestors were no longer powerful enough to provide for and protect the islanders. Statue building was abruptly abandoned and all the erect moai were knocked down. By 1825 every single moai was down – all 288 of them that had been erected on ahus. Hundreds more were abandoned in the quarries. With few natural resources and their faith shattered, the people struggled for survival between themselves. Could it get any worse? Oh yes.

In the 1860s Peruvian slave-traders abducted more than half the population. Those that were left squabbled over the vacated, treeless, almost barren land. There were devastating outbreaks of smallpox, tuberculosis and Catholicism. By 1877, only 111 islanders were left. Much of the cultural heritage and folklore was lost. In 1888 Chile annexed the island, confined the few islanders to one small village and turned the bleak land into a sheep farm.

There can be no doubt that what the islanders themselves started through overpopulation and depletion of natural resources, was finished by the arrival of Europeans polluting their sacred spaces, transmitting diseases, enslaving and imprisoning the few that remained.

We homo sapiens like to think we’re smart. But as we gang rape Mother Earth for oil and minerals, poison the once-bountiful seas with effluent, pollute the air with noxious gases, cut down forests, greedily guzzle finite fresh water supplies, mercilessly extinguish other species and breed like fucking locusts, we appear not to be smart enough to learn Easter Island’s lessons and prevent our own downfall.

One hundred years ago today, his two companions lying frozen to death next to him, 43-year-old Captain Robert Falcon Scott, died in a tent in Antarctica, sheltering from a blizzard which had raged for nine days. Yes they had made it to the South Pole but he wasn’t the first; Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten him to it by a month.

In recent years it has been fashionable to debunk the efforts of Scott and his men as a heroic failure. But I will have none of it. Scott and his men did reach the pole. And their expedition conducted ground-breaking scientific research which still resonates today.

Scott’s early Royal Navy career was uneventful. In the 1890s financial ruin and deaths in Scott’s family meant that at aged 30, he was now the breadwinner for his mother and two sisters. He had to find of a way of getting promoted. A chance meeting with Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographic Society, would change his fortunes. He was accepted onto the trail-blazing British National Antarctic ‘Discovery’ Expedition. That journey from 1901 to 1903 mapped huge parts of Antarctica for the first time and made original observations in biology, geology, meteorology and physics. And they went further south than any person had been before: 82°17′S. The expedition was haled as a great success and Scott and his men returned as heroes. What wasn’t mentioned was that they failed to master the techniques of polar travel using skis, sleds and dogs. The Norwegians were already way ahead in this.

In 1908 Scott married artist Kathleen Bruce and their son Peter Markham Scott was born in 1909. Peter would later become a pioneer of wildlife conservation. However, the joy of his new family and the adulation of the British people were not enough to keep Scott from returning to Antarctica. He would take command of the Terra Nova expedition.

The expedition of 65 men would carry out a massive programme of scientific discovery, as well as attempt to reach the South Pole. Japan and Australia were also planning Antarctic journeys. The Norwegians seemed not to pose a threat as, publicly at least, they appeared to be concentrating their efforts in the North. The Brits had best get on with it or someone else would grab the glory. But on their way south, while Scott was in Melbourne, he received a telegram from Norwegian explorer Amundsen telling him that he was heading south. The race was on.

Amundsen’s only mission was to reach the Pole. With skis and dog sleds, his men dressed in skins and furs like the Inuit, he would use the highly efficient ‘dog-eat-dog’ technique as he went along to provide fresh meat. Scott’s polar plans were more complex and included establishing a research base, testing motorised sledges, and using ponies, dog sleds and man-hauling to carry provisions, scientific instruments, log books and specimens.

Scott and his men spent 1911 establishing a base a Cape Evans and laying depots of provisions. Parties were sent out on missions to make geological surveys and collect specimens. They experimented with equipment and rations. Their findings would influence polar explorers and mountaineers for decades. A zoological expedition set out in the winter to conduct research on emperor penguins to try to discover an embryological link between the birds and dinosaurs. Apsley Cherry-Garrard who took part in this expedition later wrote an account of it in his astonishing book The Worst Journey in the World.

In September, 16 men set out towards the Pole. Most of the men were there as support and would be sent back in stages leaving only a small group to go all the way to the Pole. At 87° 32′ S on 3 January 1912, Scott decided on the group: himself, Edward Wilson, Lawrence Oates, Henry Bowers and Edgar Evans. Five men, not four as originally planned. This meant recalculating rations and would have dire consequences.

They arrived at the Pole on 17 January, but Amundsen had planted his flag there a month before. The disappointment was overwhelming. “Great God! This is an awful place” Scott wrote “and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

The return journey started out well. But the rations were insufficient his men soon lost condition. Evans’ frostbite worsened. He died at the the Beardmore Glacier on 17 February. Oates’ feet were horribly frostbitten and hampered the progress of the entire party. On 16 March, he struggled to put his boots on for the last time and stepped out into a blizzard saying “I am just going outside and may be some time”. Scott acknowledged his sacrifice: “We knew that Oates was walking to his death… it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.”

Scott, Wilson and Bowers continued towards One Ton depot which they knew could save them, but an unseasonal blizzard halted them just 11 miles short of their target. Malnourished, frostbitten, weak and trapped inside the tent by the weather, they knew what was coming.

“I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.”

Scott was probably the last of the three to die on 29 March 1912.

A search party found the tent in November that year. They salvaged rolls of photographs; meteorological observations; diaries and 16 kgs of fossils gathered on the way back from the Pole. They left the bodies in the tent and buried them under a mound of snow.

That five men failed to be first to the Pole and died is only half the story. The expedition recorded more than 2,000 animals, 400 new to science. They gathered rock samples and fossils which revealed the geological story of the Antarctic continent. They made detailed observations in glaciology, meteorology, geology and studied diet, clothing and rations in extreme conditions. Cherry-Garrard wrote: “We had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made.”

And apart from the science, there was the art! Herbert Ponting’s photographs recorded the grandeur and the hardships. And Edward Wilson’s illustrations of Antarctic birds and wildlife are unsurpassed.

One hundred years after Scott we now face climate change, melting icecaps, rising sea levels, weird weather phenomena and a crisis of extinctions. Polar science is now more important to us than ever in helping us work out what is going on and what – if anything – we can do about it. Captain Scott’s was, surely, one of the founding fathers of polar science.

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…”

I was pretty sure it would take months to find another paid job (it has) so I thought I’d use this period to have a go with acrylics, a medium I’ve never had the time and space to immerse myself in before.

After more than a dozen canvases, which you can see in my galleries, I feel like I’m beginning to make progress. My latest work is In Birdland a composition which features two of my current obsessions: trees and birds. To make this I looked for inspiration to folk art, Tudor embroidery and William Morris’s Arts & Crafts movement , as well as referring to David Hockney for the palette, keeping everything bright and contrasty.

The birds’ plumage is based on real birds – evolution through natural selection produces far more beautiful designs than I could ever think up. So for the ornithologists amongst you, top left, with the strawberry is a thrush. This motif is taken directly from William Morris’s wallpaper design ‘The Strawberry Thief’.  All the other birds are South American species: a meadowlark (bottom left), a tanager (centre), a trogon (top right), and a rush-tyrant (bottom right).

As I painted, I took photos at regular stages which I have edited together in this short film so you can see in 60 seconds what it took me about 20 hours to paint.

‘In Birdland’ will be shown in my forthcoming exhibition, which I do hope you will come to. More information  here.

The show starts with four giant colourful canvases – one for each season – of a landscape featuring three trees near Thixendale in his native Yorkshire. It’s a taste of what’s to come; the rolling East Yorkshire landscape obsessively observed. The views he chooses are not chocolate-boxy, they are quite ordinary: the edge of a cornfield, a pile of logs, a puddle in a muddy farm track, some thistles at the roadside, some trees. And he makes them majestic, which is actually, if we choose to look a bit harder, exactly what they are.

This is a lesson Hockney learned from Vincent van Gogh. In this show, Hockney’s ‘inner Vincent’ hangs out more than ever before; in the marks he makes, the confident way he applies paint and his love of bright, some might say gaudy colours. He seems to have picked up precisely where Vincent left off in 1890. And why wouldn’t you follow The Master?

It’s taken Hockney’s whole 60-year career as a painter to get here. The swimming pools and sparkling Californian sunlight are gone, in favour of a simpler joy: the joy of contemplating the natural world.

I gasped at A Bigger Grand Canyon. And it’s a whopper: smaller canvases tiled together to make one huge sweep of saturated reds, colours thumped down thickly. Stand close to it – it’s huge – and you are overwhelmed as it fills your field of vision, exactly as you are when you stand on the south rim and look north towards Utah. Jaw-dropping.

And then we get back to Yorkshire. If you think what you’ve seen so far is good, then this takes it up a gear. One room displays 36 watercolours and more smaller oils than I could count, all done from life, each one taking not more than a couple of hours at most. So pretty, so ordinary, so simple, so plain. They make your heart sing with joy.

And I think that’s the secret. It’s visual plain English. There’s nothing fancy about what he’s doing, he’s just saying it how it is. So refreshing.

He doesn’t get bogged down in detail, although his observations are highly detailed. Instead, he just gets on with the job. No fiddling. See it, paint it, move on. Confident. The result is simple genius.

Hockney has always loved experimenting with new ways of seeing and new technology. And so when he discovered he could make pictures more simply than ever using first his iPhone, and now his iPad, it was a revelation. The iPad seems to help him focus on observation, drawing and colour even more clearly and the technology allows him to work swiftly – with astonishing results.

In a gallery called The Arrival of Spring, there are 51 drawings made on his iPad, charting the same few humble locations over the course of 5 months. Seen together they glow in the prettiest greens and pinks and blues and culminate in one gigantic oil painting made up of 32 canvases nearly 10 metres long and 4 metres high. The effect is of pure joy!

Not everything in this show gets my vote. The sequence of paintings of the flowering of the may bushes doesn’t always work for me. The feeling I got was of trees with infestations of caterpillars or some freak gone crazy with squirty cream. But this is more than outweighed by the epic series of Woldgate Woods through the seasons. Study them hard, dear reader, and you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again.

The paintings carry no overt political messages. Except that they do. They just don’t shout them. There are no shopping malls, consumer goods or pop culture. Hockney, one of the founding fathers of British pop art, has rejected pop culture and ask us to look at what really matters: the landscape, the seasons, the simple pleasure of the natural world. I think that’s a pretty big and important message.

For any generous benefactors out there, can I just say I really, really want an iPad with a drawing stylus. It’s my birthday next month. Given my previous paragraph, this statement may contain traces of irony.

Want to see more Hockneys? Check out his website. The show is on until 9 April 2012.