Fort St Angelo is opposite the city of Valletta in Malta. de Bono is a Maltese surname. My grandmother was always encouraging me to paint.
Thank you for visiting this showcase of my paintings. I have returned to painting after a long break. The Chapel series was painted when I was 18. Fort St Angelo when I was 38. Tall Sky and the portrait of my father, Edward de Bono, in 2022 when I was 50. I love painting and have time to make up as I learn more.
I spent some of my childhood in North Norfolk and am inspired by the vast sky. This is a challenge to the idea that "landscapes are traditionally painted in landscape orientation". How we frame an idea shapes other people's thinking. The landscape orientation does not convey the height of the sky. So I decided to create an exaggerated portrait of a landscape. For the composition, I used the pano mode on my phone to take a long vertical shot - leaning over backwards in an arc to catch as much as possible. Seen from this perspective we are small in relation to the sky, our climate. Seen from this perspective it is something to be respected.
I started to paint as a teenager. This is an oil painting of the school chapel from the opposite aspect used in the Chapel series. The Headmaster commissioned me to paint this for his wife's birthday. I am open to commissions of places or people and would love to hear from you via this website
or via Instagram
My father originated the phrase "Lateral Thinking" and dedicated his life to teaching thinking as a skill. Especially the importance of perception in shaping how we then apply the more traditional thinking skills of logic and analysis. I thought it fitting to paint a subjective colour portrait of him from this photograph.
My daughter Rose is an art student and wrote this about her piece Artificial Bioluminescence.
Bioluminescence is a natural light phenomenon produced by living organisms. I am fascinated by deep sea dwellers as they are the closest thing to aliens. I took inspiration from biomimicry and cephalopods to create my own blueprint for a robot jellyfish. Maybe one capable of exploring the ocean depths we know so little about. I first sketched the piece digitally and then printed it onto acetate paper before covering A2 card in cyanotype paint. Leaving the acetate over the photosensitive cyanotype in sunlight meant the sketch printed inversely (white on blue) on the now blueprint paper. I then took a white pen and dotted thousands of marks to create the main form of the robot.