I have some new greetings cards in the shop of my recent paintings The Wallace Line and Life on Planet Three. Cards are blank, measure 126mm x126mm, come with envelopes and cost cost £7 plus £1 for P&P for 6 cards (3 cards of each design).

Note: The F and JH numbers in this blog are standard references used by van Gogh scholars to refer to specific works, rather like scientists use Latin names to refer to species.

Today I went to see The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and OH MY GOD, it was absolutely incredible. I got some real surprises and met some old familiar friends.

There are 65 paintings, 40 drawings and 40 letters on show. The letters are so fragile they rarely if ever get exhibited.

Most people are familiar with one or two of Vincent's works; the sunflowers or the starry nights, perhaps. But for many people, when they see a van Gogh for real for the first time they are knocked out by the vibrant colour. I know I do. How can colour be so bright?! But Vincent gets me with a second punch to the jaw I every time when I consider his drawing. For me, to even attempt to paint without getting the drawing right is a mistake. Vincent knew this – indeed I learned it from him. So to see so many of his acutely observed drawings, some accompanied by the painting that they refer to, was extremely revealing. The spontaneity, the sheer force of line, the accuracy, the expression… what a draftsman! I could bang on for thousands of words about it, but instead have a butcher's at this:

It’s Road with Pollarded Willows (F1678, JH46) drawn in 1881 in Etten. I spent AGES looking at it. This has everything in it that a good prog rock song should have: contrast, rhythm, tone, narrative, simplicity, skill, all ultimately leading to a wholesome and satisfying beauty. I love the cottages on the far right hand side with their red roofs. Like the ting of a triangle in a Steely Dan tune.

Later, in Arles, Vincent would take to using a reed pen, making marks with it that Japanese printmakers do using woodblock printing techniques. The drawings look like handwriting, and are as spontaneous and 'legible' almost in the same way. I'm absolutely BONKERS about Vincent's reed pen drawings. Here’s one of boats near Les-Stes-Maries-sur-Mer:

There were many paintings hanging that I'd seen before in the Dutch or French collections, but to see them hung together was delightful. Take for example one wall in which featured a series of portraits of the Roulin family that Vincent made friends with in Arles in 1888. Here’s Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (F432, JH 1522)…

…which was hung alongside portraits Vincent made of his wife Augustine, their young son Camille and baby Marcel. You could really get a sense of just what his friendship with this family meant to him. It was very moving. These were pictures I was familiar with. But there were others on show that I’d never seen before, from private collections.

For example, here's Snowy landscape in Arles (F391, JH1358 ) painted in February 1888 just a few days after Vincent arrived in Provence.

The delicacy of colour, lots of high key whites and pastel tones which he'd been using in Paris, spill out.

Another surprise was White farmhouse among olive trees (F664) which I’d never seen before and sprung out at me like a pouncing leopard.

It hasn't been exhibited for 109 years and now lives in Japan. The luminous colour in the sky left me gasping 'how does he do that?' Having been into the Provencal landscape close to where this was painted I understood every brushstroke, each wiggle of blue that makes the mountains, each slash of brown that makes the trees. For reasons I can’t explain, this one moved me to tears.

And how about this for piece of genius from someone who hardly yet considered himself to be any more than a student of art? It's Cottage with Peasant Woman Digging (F1669, JH825) painted in Nuenen in 1885.

See what I mean about the drawing? Brilliant. Just bloody brilliant! My feet feel muddy just looking at it. Look at the white bricks around the door - Vincent has even managed to express the detail of the lime leaching out from the mortar.

And so to the letters...

Even if Vincent had never painted a stroke, he would surely be known as a writer. His written observations of the world around him are as fascinating and profound as his pictures. But Im not going to tell you about the content of the letters because you can read them – every single one – online right here. Instead I'm going to tell you about their physical appearance. The first shock is that they are tiny! Really tiny. Vincent often folded a sheet to make four pages from one leaf the size a little smaller than A4. His handwriting changes from mood to mood, from sentence to sentence. Sometimes it's scrawly, sometimes neat, sometimes he uses too much ink so it blobs. Other times you can see him rushing to the end of sentence as he hurries to get a thought down on paper. Often it’s really tiny writing. You can see the folds, the dog-eared corners, greasy marks, the pencil markings that Vincent’s sister–in-law Jo and others used to number the letters into some kind of comprehensive order.

And then there are the sketches. To better describe what he was thinking Vincent would draw little tiny sketches; of recent paintings he'd made, of ideas he’d had, or in this case (above) to show how he imagined his pictures might one day be hung together. They are so revealing.

It got me thinking about how people today don’t write letters anymore. It's all email and Facebook. I still have all the letters my mum wrote to me when she lived in Hong Kong and I missed her so much. My dad keeps all the postcards that I have sent him from all over the world. These human documents have a tangible magic that tell a fascinating personal story. It makes me sad to think that perhaps today’s iPod generation won't ever have such treasure to look back on. I’ve digressed! Sorry.

These were just a few of the fascinating and exquisite things I saw today. I could have mentioned the sensitive portrait of Sien, the woman he lived with in The Hague; or the letter Vincent's friend Paul Gauguin wrote to him from Pont Aven; or the 'last' letter … the unposted one found on Vincent's body with great dark blobby stains on it. Blood stains perhaps? A gunshot wound to the stomach is likely to bleed. So here you have it. Vincent's DNA exposed in a letter.

The curators of this exhibition have done an heroic job of getting this lot together in one place at one time. I think Vincent would be very proud.

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Comment from David Brooks of Toronto, Canada Wonderful commentary, Jane. Pen strokes or brush strokes, there's something so moving about seeing Vincent's work in person, isn't there? What an amazing opportunity to see this incredible exhibition--the first major Van Gogh exhibition in England in forty years. And to rave reviews I might add. I'm so glad that you got to see it and that you could share your passionate insights with us. And I agree about the demise of letter writing. The Helene Hanff "84 Charing Cross Road" days are behind us I'm afraid.

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I made a new short film about artist Paul Gauguin in Brittany. He returned to Brittany many times to paint, to see fellow-painters and to enjoy (what was then) a savage, remote part of France. Many of the places he lived and worked still exist. We visited Le Pouldu and Pont Aven last October.

An exhibition, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters, opens at the Royal Academy this week. I already have my ticket for next week and - oh my goodness - I just can't wait to go! Of course I want to see the letters, especially (ghoulishly) the bloodstained last one, but most of all I can't wait to see Vincent's magical energetic pen and ink drawings.

Here's what The Guardian says about the exhibition and here's what The Times says.

After 15 years of work, the Van Gogh Museum has published an astonishing six volume set of the complete letters of Vincent van Gogh. Building on the groundbreaking work done by the late Jan Hulsker, the authors have set a standard in art publishing that it’s hard to see will be bettered. A more thorough piece of work is hard to imagine: every letter, in chronological order, illustrated with the pictures he is writing about (his own and other peoples) and annotated with scientific precision. Nearly a million words!

In other artist's monographs we get someone else's point of view about an artist. But in these new volumes we meet Vincent expressing himself, unabridged, as if under an electron-microscope. For me, the greatest joy about these books is that when Vincent mentions a painting or drawing he has been working on, it is illustrated alongside the text. As are the many sketches he included in his correspondence. So we can see immediately what he's talking about, the better to understand his thinking.

The volumes are not cheap; but what price such time-consuming, painstaking scholarship? What price a lifetime of fascinating insight? We can learn as much about what it is to be human from Van Gogh's letters as we can from Shakespeare or Dickens, two writers Vincent himself admired.

The letters show Vincent to be far from the ear-slicing loony of popular imagination. They show a sincere, eloquent and troubled soul seeking with grim determination to teach himself to be an artist of some worth. They show a human being struggling with desperate loneliness and a debt of gratitude to his brother Theo that he knew he could never repay. Neither Dickens nor Shakespeare could have written a greater tragedy.

The letters are also online here complete with annotations and illustrations. The way the website works is itself a work of art.

I wanted to combine some of the ideas and motifs I had so enjoyed making in my recent works "Life on Planet Three" and "The Wallace Line" into something simpler and less complex, but no less colourful or joyful. The result is this, the Living Planet:

The picture features these creatures: a brown hare; a black-browed barbet; a whale shark; a manta ray; a humpback whale; emperor penguins; a sea lion; a hummingbird; a tree frog; a clownfish; a monarch butterfly; a lion; a royal albatross and a dusky dolphin. This drypoint tinted with watercolour measures 360mm x360mm, and I have a limited edition of five original hand-made images costing £100 unframed and £130 framed.

My village of Eynsham in west Oxfordshire rarely gets snow. But yesterday it began to fall about 4o'clock in the afternoon and continued to fall for the next 12 hours. I went out about midnight last night to see what was going on. The view down the Pug Lane alley at the back of our house looked so pretty:

And Mill Street looked beautiful with three inches of snow:

The Bartholomew Room in the Square still had its Christmas lights on:

At the village Post Office all was quiet:

This morning nearly eight inches of snow lay on the ground.

I haven’t seen snow where I live so deep since the winter of 1981. I went for a quick potter round the village. The roads hadn’t been treated and there were no buses:

My favourite shop in the world was open for business:

The snow had settled very picturesquely on the church tower and porch:

I trudged down towards to the tollbridge to see if any traffic was getting through anywhere. But judging by the tracks, only a few cars had braved the elements:

Down by the Thames, the snow lay deep on the branches making everything look like a Japanese print by Hokusai:

I was fascinated with the birds I saw; a dozen long-tailed tits flitting, a goldfinch singing by the Wharf stream, and best of all, perhaps 30 redwings plucking berries from a tree. Here's one I managed to get quite close to:

They were suddenly startled by a hungry sparrowhawk – I saw his unmistakable silhouette swoop over me against the white sky.

On this day three years ago my best mate Rebecca van der Putt died aged 38, another victim of cancer. Sister of Debs, daughter of Mavis, wife of 'the arresting' Kate, oh-my-godmother to Rupert and much loved friend to just about everyone in my family, we all still miss her. If you knew her you were so very lucky.

There's not much she liked more than a nice cup of tea and a chat. Except perhaps real ale. Cheers, girl!

During 2009 Moth and I watched an awful lot of 1970s TV drama series, notably Poldark, Colditz and for the past couple of months we have been avidly working our way through all 91 gripping episodes of The Onedin Line which we finished just before midnight last night. Magnificent!

Readers of a certain age will remember it fondly, and if you're not of that certain age you may just remember the title sequence: majestic tall ships in full sail, cutting their way through the seas to the sound of Khachaturian's Adagio from 'Spartacus'. Here's a little clip to remind you:

I so enjoyed letting my mind run free when I painted 'Life on Planet Three', I thought I'd do a similar painting using many of the same motifs and visual language, but with Indonesia and Australia at its heart. The result is this: The Wallace Line.

The Wallace Line is a biogeographical boundary that separates Asia and Australia. The line is named after naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who during his travels through the Indonesian archipelago in the mid 19th century, first observed that to the west of the island of Lombok only Asiatic species occur and that to the east of Bali is a mixture of Asiatic and Australian species.

The painting features some of the creatures that Wallace collected on his travels, including a huge atlas moth and a black-browed barbet (the green bird on the top left), a specimen which Wallace collected I saw last year on display at the Natural History Museum in Tring.

I can't tell you how much fun it has been to express my fascination for biogeography and my admiration for Wallace in bright bold colours.

I've been having tremendous fun making my latest painting, entitled Life on Planet Three:

Hope you like it as much as enjoyed painting it.

After last week's auction and media scrum over the Swinford toll bridge, I thought it was all over. It seems I was wrong! On Friday I was asked by NBC news correspondent Mike Taibbi to join him at the riverside to be part of a news item he was making about the quirky and maddening matter of the bridge. What a lovely man he is. I especially love him because he put a couple of my paintings in his report. Thanks so much for that Mike!

Here's the report, which aired in the US yesterday to who knows how many million people, 12 December 2009:

I haven't blogged much these past few weeks because I've been busy with the media over that bloody toll bridge. And when I haven't been doing that, I've been working, planning my next painting and watching the first 50 episodes of The Onedin Line. I kid you not. Only 41 to go.

Apart from that, I've been repeatedly listening to the only three albums recorded by early 70s band Hummingbird, who I just can’t get enough of. You have to love a band with a bird name. Formed by guitarist and vocalist Bobby Tench in 1973 (you have to love a man with a fish name), they play funky rock with a large dollop of soul thrown in. Their songs have fabulous melodies, rubbery bouncing rhythms and grooves like crevasses. I even like their ballads, for goodness sake, something I usually loathe.

Of their three albums Diamond Nights is the one I need to hear daily. It features my two favourite songs Got My Led Boots On and Anaconda. I wish I could point you to a clip on You Tube or elsewhere, but I can find nothing to show you. Hummingbird were apparently big in Japan, and must still be, because Diamond Nights was re-issued there in 2007.

Thinking about Hummingbird, there are two things that really gall me. One: that Susan Boyle's tedious unadventurous caterwauling is so popular while practically no one has ever heard of Bobby Tench's Hummingbird. Two: that Hummingbird are sadly no more, and I will therefore never see them play live. Waaa! Life's so unfair!

I simply love Oxford University's Natural History Museum. The building itself is a masterpiece of 19th century engineering, with masonry so carefully considered and carved the stones seem to live. And then there’s the great glass roof, held aloft by soaring metal arched beams, decorated with leaves and flowers. If it was simply an empty space, people would still come to marvel at it.

Then consider that this architectural stunner contains an extraordinary treasure trove of natural wonders: dodo relics; the oldest surviving pinned insect -a tsetse fly collected by David Livingstone; delicate fossils of exquisite variety; and even some exhibits collected by Darwin himself during his voyage on the Beagle. Despite the smell of the place (slightly musty with the merest whiff of formaldehyde) I like to go there because it is life-affirming and it makes me feel completely insignificant.

It occurred to me that I really ought to have a go at making a picture of this wonderful place. But how? The only way I could think was to start from the sense of awe and drama I feel for life on Planet Three, and couple it with the sense of 'not knowing where to look next' whenever I’m there. So here it is: 'A grand view of life at Oxford's Natural History Museum':

The title comes (almost) from Darwin, who said in the Origin of Species (published 150 years ago this week) of his theory of evolution that there is "a grandeur in this view of life". I agree. And I especially get that feeling when I go to the museum and witness biodiversity laid out before me.

I hope you like the picture. It’s a drypoint tinted with watercolour. This one is my artist's proof of a limited edition of just four.

If I've been a bit quiet here of late it’s because I've been very busy with my campaign about the Swinford toll bridge. While the bridge is much-loved as a spectacular piece of Georgian architecture, the toll collection is locally very unpopular as it causes completely unnecessary traffic queues, frustration, time-wasting and pollution; all because of an 18th century law which allows highway robbery.

The bridge has been for sale since May but will be auctioned on 3 December in London. The ludicrous quirkiness of the Act of Parliament which governs the bridge allows its private owner to collect a tiny toll (5p for cars) tax-free. This unusual legal tax-dodge has apparently excited interest from all manner of ‘investors’ (I have been calling them greedheads) all happy to cream in the profits from the cash cow at the expense of the misery of the bridge users. It's also excited the interest of the media. And this is what has been keeping me busy.

Pictured above, a detail of the bridge from 'River song'. Although I use the bridge, I neither pay the toll nor get stuck in the queues. Why? Because I ride a motorcycle. It's ironic that I'm the one being publicly gobby about it. So why do I bother? Good question.

Just because something is legal doesn't make it right (take for example lapdancing, Scientology, the BNP) and I always try to challenge injustice where I see it. Perhaps that makes me a liberal leftie? Or just a whingy git? It depends on your point of view, and actually I neither know nor care. I am simply happy to live in country which allows me to speak up about things that matter to me.

Regular readers of this blog, my dear customers and friends will be pleased to hear I am still making pictures. I'm currently working on one of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and I'm planning a series based on Planet Earth. In the meantime, here, once again, is my most recent picture featuring that bridge: 'Still life in Eynsham':

I'll be in the Bartholomew Room, The Square in Eynsham on Saturday 21 November from 12noon to 2pm at the local Arts Group exhibition if you want to talk to me about the bridge, or better still about paintings!

When I was growing up in the late 60s and early 70s there seemed to be a lot on the telly about World War 2. The masterful The World at War, narrated by Laurence Olivier, seemed to run every week throughout my entire childhood. Episode 20, ‘Genocide’ was how I learned about the holocaust and it haunted me for years. And then there was the BBC TV series Colditz. I was only nine when the first series was broadcast so I don’t remember all that much about it, but I do remember that is was, somehow, a national event and something to be proud of.

Moth bought all 28 superb episodes of Colditz on DVD. And I can barely believe we’ve already watched 19 episodes. The superb and subtle acting and the terrific scripts make up for the poor picture quality. And the long winter evenings are flying by!

We are lucky enough to get a lot of barn owls (Tyto alba) round here. Usually I only get a fleeing glimpse as they swoop past when I’m driving home. So I was very happy to have seen one very close up back in August at the Yorkshire Dales Falconry Centre. Since then I’ve been thinking about doing a painting of one in some detail, using some of Moth’s photos as reference material.

I thought it would be nice to compose one flying over the Rollright stones, not least because the colours on a barn owl are similar to the stones themselves, all soft smudgey greys and whites with accents of yellow, but also because they share a mysterious silent beauty. I hope you like it:

Here’s something you don't see every day…

Photos: Moth Clark

This year I'm selling Christmas cards. The following two designs are available in my online shop, right here. You won't be surprised to learn that my designs shy away from the baby Jesus and other overt religious symbolism. Instead, my seasonal offerings feature natural world magic, especially poignant in this Darwin anniversary year.

Here's Christmas tree of life (with thanks to Klimt and Darwin). You’ll notice a few little Christmassy references among the swirly branches of the tree. It's available in packs of 10 cards with envelopes for £3.50.

These are already selling fast!

Count Raggi's bird of paradise is the national bird of Papua New Guinea, and a more joyful, dazzling and triumphant symbol of the natural world I can't imagine. If you saw the BBC’s recent Lost Land of the Volcano, you will have seen BBC cameramen Gordon Buchanan tracking and filming these astonishing birds in New Guinea. Packs of 6 cards with envelopes are usually £5, but as a special Christmas offer, I'm selling them for just £2.50.

This year you can also buy charity cards with my designs on through eBay, available in packs of 10 cards with envelopes for £3.50. All proceeds go to YWCA.

Here's Christmas dove, click here to buy.

And here’s The First Day of Christmas, click here to buy.

Yesterday we went fishing on the Thames near the beautiful, polite riverside village of Pangbourne. Our friend Martin recently bought himself a little boat and asked if we would like to join him for a spot of pike fishing in a weirpool just by Whitchurch toll bridge (the other privately owned Oxfordshire toll bridge which legally rips off the travelling public - for 40p a time, would you believe).

Three lovely men in a boat: Martin, Moth and Rupe
I joined them after having visited Martin's lovely wife Nat. The river was alive with birds; herons, grey wagtails, kingfishers and even a pair of Egyptian geese.
But it was the fish we were after, and when I joined them after they'd been fishing two hours, they hadn't even had a bite. As the afternoon sun sank lower signs of life in the water became visible; a few bubbles here and there, ripples from little fish scared up to the surface by predators. There were fish down there all right.

Finally, Rupe was 'in' and judging by the bend on the line, it was big! He played the fish for a few minutes and finally got it close to the boat.

As its head surfaced, I thought it looked more like a crocodile than a fish – the diameter across its head was six inches, and we could see it was three maybe even four feet long! That must weigh 15lbs, we reckoned! Martin reached for the landing net, got the net underneath the monster (which was going to have bend a bit to fit in it…) but at the very last moment, disaster! It came off the hook and disappeared back into the dark water. Luckily, Moth's photo shows I’m not exaggerating:
We were left with only the memory of the one that got away.