ART – Tim O'Hare

Tottenham Hotspur and Norwich City #art

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (October 2025)

One of the things that I do quite frequently with my art is to create bespoke birthday and special occasion cards to send to family members and friends. I generally paint these on rough-edged, rag paper that I bought a stash of a couple of years ago. This fits nicely onto a 5 x7 inch recycled card blank to give the finish card a really distinctive appearance (quite apart from the fact that the picture is a one-off painting completed specially for each occasion). Obviously, the idea with these is to paint a picture that has some kind of special significance for the recipient, and to that end, within the space of a few weeks in the later months of of 2025, I found myself painting two pictures of different football stadia.

The first of these (see above) was for a birthday card for my younger daughter’s partner. For his sins, he is a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, although at the moment this isn’t something that he is particularly quick, or proud, to broadcast, and fortunately, he’s now also a season-ticket holder at Plymouth Argyle. I’ve heard it said that the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the best new stadium in the country, and it certainly looks impressive when viewed from afar, with a satisfyingly neat and modern, wraparound, design. When painting the picture, I focused on putting a good amount of detail into the stadium itself to ensure that it was distinctive and recognisable, and then I just tried to capture the general impression of the surrounding streets, roads and buildings (partly because it was pretty much impossible to do otherwise). I think that this contrast works well and I like the way that the picture turned out overall.

I followed up my Tottenham Hotspur Stadium picture with a painting of Carrow Road (see below), long-time home of Norwich City, for a birthday card for my father-in-law. He was originally a Chelsea fan, but Norwich City become his adopted club when he moved to the city in the early 1970s, and he was a season-ticket holder there for many years before it became too difficult for him to make it to games. Carrow Road is a stadium that has been developed and upgraded multiple times over the years, and so unlike the sleek lines of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, it consists of an assortment of stands of different sizes and structures. Looking at the Carrow Road picture now, I can’t help but wonder whether my photo shows the final version, because it surprises me that I apparently left most of the surrounding buildings unpainted. However, this seems to be the only photo of this painting that I have, so I guess it must have ended up that way. Funnily enough, I quite like the unpainted buildings and kind of wish that I had left the ones on the left-hand side as uncoloured ink drawings too. Perhaps this is a style/approach that I might deliberately incorporate into another picture someday. I also like the way that I put in the cutting stripes on the pitch, and the way that you can see the countryside landscape that surrounds the city in the background.

It’s always fun to create these bespoke birthday and special occasions card pictures, partly because they are always well received of course, but also because it’s interesting to tackle subjects that I might not otherwise attempt to paint.

Bristol Miniatures #art

Towards the end of last year I had got myself into a pretty strong routine of spending 30-40 minutes at the start of most days painting. In almost all of these ‘art practice’ session I would produce a miniature watercolour painting, about 5cm square, working my way through different themes. Pretty much as soon as I finished one series of 12 pictures, I would move onto a new theme and begin the next series. So, having completed my London Landmarks series I was in search of a new theme to work through and a chance comment by one of my personal tutees plus a comment from someone who had purchased a small composite print of my Plymouth Miniatures series pictures, led me to select the city of Bristol for my ninth series.

Some of the subjects for the series were immediately obvious – for example, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain – and it wasn’t difficult to identify other buildings and views that were suitable for miniaturisation. The full list of the pictures (working left to right and top to bottom in the grid of pictures shown above) is:

the brightly coloured houses of Cliftonwood
Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge
the interior of St Nicholas Market
the Bristol Balloon Fiesta
the M-Shed museum on the dock side
Bristol Templemeads Railway Station
the Cabot Tower
the Bristol Hippodrome
the Old Vic Theatre
the Clifton Observatory
Brunel’s SS Great Britain
Bristol Cathedral

As with all of my other miniature watercolour series (Dartmoor Scenes, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks, Exmoor Views, Plymouth Miniatures, House Plants, Trees, London Landmarks), I have listed composite prints and greetings cards of these pictures on Etsy. The best sellers so far seem to be the ones of the Old Vic Theatre and the Bristol Hippodrome, but I also had one order for almost the entire set of cards!

I’ve got two favourites from this set, the colourful houses of Cliftonwood, and the interior of St Nicholas Market. In the first case, I just like the simple blocks of colour that make up the houses, and in the second, I’ve always liked views that have a straight feature such as a road, railway line or canal that disappears towards a central vanishing point…

London Landmarks #art

For my eighth series of miniature watercolour paintings, completed last September, I decided that it was time to tackle some of the well-known landmarks in the U.K.’s capital city London. I have to admit that my own visits to London are relatively few in number, with most of the recent ones revolving around trips to watch Plymouth Argyle playing at Wembley (twice, both times depressingly unsuccessful), and against Arsenal, Chelsea and Brentford in the FA Cup. However, like pretty much everyone else, I’m very familiar with many of the obvious historical and touristic landmarks… but when I paint a series of miniature watercolours, I like to throw in a few less obvious subjects, and in the case of this set, that led to me choosing Hampton Court Palace, Battersea Power Station, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Globe Theatre.

The full list of the pictures (working left to right and top to bottom in the grid of pictures shown above) is:

the Big Ben clock tower
London Bridge
Buckingham Palace
Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square
the London Eye
the Tower of London
the Globe Theatre
St Paul’s Cathedral
Hampton Court Palace
Battersea Power Station
the Royal Albert Hall
Westminster Abbey

As with all of my other miniature watercolour series (Dartmoor Scenes, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks, Exmoor Views, Plymouth Miniatures, House Plants, Trees), I have listed composite prints and greetings cards of these pictures on Etsy and have sold quite a few of the greetings cards since doing so. Interestingly, as with some of my other series, I am finding that it is the cards featuring more unusual subjects that tend to be the ones that sell. I found this a bit puzzling at first, but on reflection it makes sense because with the more obvious subjects, buyers have lots of choice and the platform algorithm is much less likely to show them my picture in response to their search.

If I was going to pick out a favourite from this series I think I might go for Hampton Court Palace. I think I have picked out enough of the detail in the building and also managed to give it a bit of depth with the shadow under the archway. I think the people in the foreground also help to add interest.

Suffolk Holiday August 2025 #art

Back in April 2025 we spent a week in rural Suffolk, our third visit to the county in three years. Our first trip there, in summer 2023, was something of an accident. We had booked accommodation for a week in Horning in the Norfolk Broads, but almost instantly recognised that it wasn’t a place we wanted to spend a week (too many ‘Private’ signs, too little access to the edges of the waterways, too many noisy ‘party’ boats cruising around, and so many people boozing their time away). As a result, after two less-than-great days, we decided to look online for somewhere different that we could stay that was not too expensive and not too far away for the rest of the week. After a bit of deliberation about the sunk cost of an aborted trip, we headed south to the small village of Redgrave, just on the Suffolk side of the Suffolk-Norfolk border. At the time, Suffolk was a county I had never visited before, and of which I had no great expectations, but within minutes of arriving there I felt settled and relaxed, able to enjoy walks and runs from the doorstep in the marvellous farmland countryside of the surrounding area. We enjoyed our stay so much that we returned to the same accommodation for an Easter holiday break the following year, but for our third visit, in 2025, we were forced to move to a different location. [I should note here that trips all the way over to East Anglia from our home in Plymouth were partly linked to visits to elderly family members in Norwich].

Consequently, in August 2025 we found ourselves staying in another small village, a little to the east of Redgrave and a little deeper into Suffolk. Once again, we enjoyed our stay, although the location wasn’t quite as good, with less options for walks in the immediate vicinity, and no cafe or pub within walking distance. We occupied ourselves with visits to Norwich, and the nearby village of Eye, and walks from Hoxne and Walsham-le-Willows, and we were able to meet up with an old university-friend and his wife for a quick circuit of Framingham Castle. We relaxed, we read, and, of course, I painted…

The picture at the top of this post shows a quick, and with hindsight slightly abstract, picture that I painted from a photo I took while walking from Hoxne, showing a typical view of Suffolk fields. The same walk provided the subject for my second painting (below), depicting more fields, a group of farm buildings, and some sharply lined fields. I find that the photos I take quite often feature fields with patterns of lines from ploughing or grass cutting, so it seems that I have a bit of a thing for parallel lines and angles!

The final picture (below) is of the holiday accommodation that we were staying in. I painted this one to leave behind as a thank you to the owners – a practice that has now become something of a tradition whenever we go away.

We didn’t make it back to Suffolk this year, but we did end up making two trips to Norfolk in April and May. Hopefully, at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’ll share some thoughts about those trips and some of the pictures that I painted on them, as I work my way forwards in time to bring my blog-posting-writing up to the present day.

Plymouth Miniatures #art

As might be apparent from some of my previous pieces on this website, through the latter part of 2025 and early months of 2026, I got into a nice routine of spending ~30 minutes on many mornings, creating miniature square, ink and watercolour paintings. Once I got established with this routine, I decided that I would always aim to produce these pictures in sets of twelve in what I now refer to as one of my ‘Miniature Watercolour’ series. On completion of one series, I would pick a new theme and then launch straight into painting the next set of pictures. Initially, most of my themes were geographically based, and most of those were relatively local (Dartmoor Scenes, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks, Exmoor Views), but a few other themes did find their way into the mix (House Plants, Trees). Consequently, given that I live and work in Plymouth, the only surprising thing about me completing a Plymouth Miniatures series is that it was the seventh theme I had tackled.

Some of the subjects depicted in this Plymouth Miniature watercolour series overlap with ones I included in the (larger) Plymouth Postcards series I painted earlier in the year, but there are quite a few that I hadn’t tackled before. Working from top-left, across and down the grid of pictures above (with the different ones marked with a *), the paintings show:

the Mayflower Steps* – which are not actually the steps from which the Pilgrim Fathers departed English shores in 1620, but a more modern creation.
the Dolphin Pub* in the Barbican – possibly the most iconic and well-known drinking establishment in the city.
boats moored on the quayside of Sutton Harbour*.
Smeaton’s Tower – formerly the lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock, it was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe in the 1880s as a tourist attraction, and is arguably now the best-known symbol of the city.
the Custom’s House and Three Crowns pubs next to Sutton Harbour.
Tinsido Lido – a restored open-air art-deco swimming pool on the city waterfront.
the National Marine Aquarium.
the Roland Levinsky Building on the University of Plymouth campus next to the city centre – named after the former Vice-Chancellor of the university (2002-2007).
Anthony Gormley’s Look II* sculpture, gazing out pensively over Plymouth Sound with the Hoe beyond.
the Melville Building in the Royal William Yard – formerly the Royal Navy Victualling Yard, built between 1826 and 1835, and now a location for swanky flats, a cinema, some restaurants and small retail outlets, and fairly frequent food and craft fairs and art exhibitions.
Saltram House* – the Georgian home of the Parker family on the southern bank of the River Plym, now owned by the National Trust and a key location used in the film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility.
the 16th century The Merchant’s House*, one of the few really old properties in the city that survived the German bombing raids in World War II.

If I had to pick a favourite from this set I think I would select the Look II sculpture, partly because it’s an unusual and somewhat quirky subject, but also because I’m pleased with the way that I captured the variation of colour of the copper blocks…

In the autumn (2025), I decided that, given their local interest, I would list framed, home-produced prints of these miniature pictures on Facebook Marketplace, and I was really surprised and a little shocked, to find that quite a few people decided to buy them as Christmas presents. I’ve also sold a few prints and greetings cards featuring the individual pictures via my Etsy shop. In addition, I used the pictures to make a small desk calendar and sold a few of those too – in fact I have one on my desk in front of me at the moment! So what started off as a fairly brief, meditative morning diversion, has ended up being a (very minor…) commercial success!

Exmoor Views #art

Exmoor Views Miniature Watercolour Series

Our holiday in Exmoor in July 2025 obviously left me in an Exmoory mood, because within a couple of weeks of our return home I found that I had painted nine miniature watercolours of Exmoor Views. These were in the same small square format that I had used for my previous miniature watercolour series (Dartmoor Scenes , House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks, and Trees), with each one being painted quickly as part of the ‘morning routine’ that I generally try to get through each day before I try to settle into some more substantive activity.

Most of the subjects for these pictures were locations that we had visited during our holiday, with a couple being other Exmoor locations that I was familiar with from previous visits (including the many family holidays we had in Exmoor when I was a child). Working from top-left, across and down the grid of pictures above, the paintings show:

a ruined barn in Porlock Bay
the Valley of the Rocks near Lynton
Landacre Bridge over the River Barle (possibly my mother’s favourite spot)
the bridge and ford at Malmsmead at the head of the Doone Valley
Dunkery Beacon – Somerset’s highest point
St Bueno’s Church at Culbone (said to be the smallest parish in England)
Oare Church (where Lorna Doone was shot on her wedding day)
Robber’s Bridge
a view across Porlock Bay from Bossington Hill

At the time I painted these pictures I had not fully settled into a pattern with my miniature watercolour pictures, but at some point in late summer 2025 I decided that I wanted all of these series to consist of twelve pictures, and so in October I painted three additional paintings to complete the set. These depict:

the ancient clapper bridge – Tarr Steps (also over the River Barle)
Dunster Castle
a group of red deer

Of these pictures, the most surprising one, both in terms of the subject matter and how the picture turned out, is the last. As I noted in Trees, my paintings generally avoid having people or animals in them (at least not in any detail), so the decision to have a go at drawing and painting Exmoor’s most dramatic wildlife was, for me, an unexpected and somewhat brave one! I was pleasantly surprised when they turned out quite well, in fact I think that this final picture is my favourite of the twelve:

As with my other miniature watercolour series (the ones listed above and several more that I have produced more recently), I sell greetings cards featuring the individual pictures, and home-produced prints with either nine or twelve of the pictures, in my Etsy shop and on Facebook Marketplace.

Exmoor Paintings #art

As described in the posts Quantock Paintings – Part 1 and Quantock Paintings – Part 2, our summer holiday in 2025 was a multi-part affair. A short stay at Crowcombe on the Quantock Hills in June was followed a month later, by a few days a little further west in an AirBnB in Malmsmead, Exmoor. Malmsmead is a location that is well known for being at the head of the so-called ‘Doone Valley’, which is an interesting example of a landscape feature that (now) takes its name from a work of fiction, R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 tale of romance and villainy: ‘Lorna Doone’. However, despite having made many trips to Exmoor over the years, it wasn’t somewhere that I had explored much before.

In Exmoor we were fortunate to be blessed with generally fine and warm weather, and were able to complete several great walks, including, naturally enough, one that took us all the way up the Doone Valley and west over open moorland, before returning north, with great views (see below) towards the Bristol Channel, via the village of Brendon and a nice drop of Exmoor Ale in The Staghunters Inn.

Our accommodation was only a 15 minute walk from the village of Oare, and so we also visited Oare Church, where (in the story) Lorna Doone was shot through a window by the evil, jilted Carver Doone as she stood to marry John Ridd. [Spoiler alert: Lorna survives, and John chases Carver Doone across the moor and watches him sink slowly to his death in a boggy mire, and they all (well all but Carver of course) live happily every after.]

We also completed a walk from Malmsmead towards the coast on what was perhaps the hottest afternoon of the year. This made the walk rather tough going, and this was not helped by the fact that the warm weather seemed to encourage what seemed to be every fly in the entire region to nip and nibble at me along the way.

In between the walks, I found time for some painting of course, producing the various pictures that illustrate this post. The final painting I produced whilst away was of the view across Porlock Bay, where we had walked on the first day of our holiday, from Bossington Hill. As it’s a sunset view, it seems like a good picture to use to draw this post to a close…

Trees #art

When I started painting in April 2024 I concentrated mostly on painting buildings or landscapes in which any significant living elements such as trees, animals or people were sufficiently distant that I didn’t have to worry too much about their details. After a while, as I discovered my natural style and approach to painting and gained a bit more confidence in my ability, I began to try putting more detail into my work. In the case of trees, I found that if I slowed myself down, and really paid attention to what I was doing, the results of my efforts were not at all bad. (Sadly, whilst I have had some success more recently painting birds and animals, the same still cannot be said about my horrific attempts at incorporating people into my artworks…)

The set of twelve pictures above, a set that I refer to as my Trees series, were painted between June and November 2025, and ended up being the fifth series of miniature watercolour paintings that I produced. Most of the these series were been produced over a much shorter period of time, typically no more than 2-3 weeks, but with these tree pictures I didn’t set out to generate a full set of twelve pictures, they just emerged gradually, in between all of my other painting efforts. Each picture is a 9cm square, a little larger than most of my miniature series paintings (which are typically ~5cm square), and for this reason, I’ve been able to print larger 16cm versions from the originals, that look really smart in a frame, without suffering from resolution issues.

In most cases, I painted these trees from photographs that I had taken at some point, and so I know (roughly) where most of the trees are. However, there are a few that were based on photos from internet searches, and unfortunately I’ve lost track of the details of those ones – keeping track of these kinds of details is something that I still need to get better at. Working from top-left, across and down the grid of twelve pictures, the pictures show:

a large tree on the main ridge of the Quantock Hills, above Crowcombe in Somerset, with huge roots that formed a window to frame the view beyond
twisted branches and autumn leaves (location unknown)
a lone conifer on the southwestern edge of Dartmoor, somewhere on Harrower Common near Yelverton, Devon
a view looking back along the cycle path between Clearbrook and Yelverton
a lone tree of a type that I like to refer to as a ‘symmetree’ in a slight hollow, again on the main ridge of the Quantock Hills above Crowcombe
my favourite row of beech trees below Peek Hill next to the main road from Yelverton to Princetown, Dartmoor
beech tree trunks near Grassington in Wharfedale, Yorkshire
a typically-windswept tree on Dartmoor
a muddy track through some conifer woodland (location unknown)
a lone holly tree on Roborough Down
a view through a group of pine trees, across the Yealm Estuary from the coast path between Wembury and Warren Point in South Devon
a spectacular autumnal, orange-leafed tree in the gardens of Cotehele House (or it might be in the Lost Gardens of Heligan)

Although they are quite simple, some of these tree pictures – the Peek Hill beech trees, the Yorkshire beech tree trunks, and the pine trees near Warren Point – are amongst my personal favourites of all of the pictures I have painted so far. I’ve listed prints of these pictures (composite prints of all twelve and a smaller square version with nine pictures) and greetings cards featuring individual pictures for sale on Facebook Marketplace and in my Etsy shop, but perhaps unsurprisingly, given the chances that anyone putting ‘tree painting’ into their internet search engine will be directed to my tree paintings rather than any of the hundreds if not thousands of alternatives available, I’ve not had any sales so far. But a family friend was so taken with these pictures that she bought a set of four framed prints of her favourite individual trees as a present for a friend and then came back and bought another set for her nephew! It’s nice to know that there is at least one other person out there who also likes these pictures!

Quantock Paintings – Part 2 #art

Following on from my previous art post (Quantock Paintings – Part 1), here are a few more of the paintings that I did during, or shortly after returning home from, our short break in Crowcombe, at the foot of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, last June.

First, here are a couple of pictures depicting views from walks that we did. Both are in my ‘normal’ style, a simple ink pen sketch with the watercolours added on top. I think that I have a tendency to try to put a lot of detail into my drawings (at least until I get bored and start scribbling in trees and foliage), but I am conscious that with painting it is often a case of ‘less is more’. In these two pictures I think that I managed to hold myself in check and kept the drawings fairly simple and ‘loose’. The pictures show Crowcombe Church and a view of the coastline at East Quantoxhead…

View of East Quantoxhead (with a bit of an issue on the right-hand edge!)

Next, I’ve included the results of an attempt to play with a slightly different approach, eschewing entirely the use of an ink pen to create a base sketch, and instead, going straight for the watercolour paints. I think that in many people’s minds, traditional (true?) watercolour paintings use only paints, generally placing these on a much wetter surface than I use, but I’ve not had any artistic training whatsoever so that’s not how my work has evolved. This picture shows a view from another of the walks that we did, looking west towards Minehead across hedge-lined fields with a riot of wildflowers in the foreground…

Somerset Fields with Wildflowers (no ink)

The vast majority of my paintings are of landscapes in one form or another. This is partly because I like landscapes, but also partly because whilst I might be able to make a decent fist of painting trees, fields, hills and buildings etc., I’m pretty much hopeless at drawing and painting people and animals. So, the picture below is a little unusual because it features me, standing at a gate looking east from the main ridge of the Quantock Hills. I like this picture because it is a bit quirky, with some nice ‘busy’ trees, but I don’t think it does anything to improve my reputation as a painter of people!

Finally, it’s become a tradition now that I paint a picture showing whatever accommodation we have stayed in when we are away, which we then leave behind as a thank you to the owner of the accommodation. In this case, we were staying in a delightful little Shepherd’s Hut, with a sunset view towards Exmoor. Now, for me to describe a Shepherd’s Hut as ‘delightful’ is something of a miracle, but although the picture doesn’t capture the view, I think it does capture something of the charm of the place.

I’ve written this post almost exactly one year on from our stay in Crowcombe, and it’s been nice to look back on these pictures and be reminded of a really pleasant few days in a quiet and beautiful part of the world.

Quantock Paintings – Part 1 #art

In recent summers we have take a series of summer holidays walking in the Yorkshire Dales – first in Swaledale (staying at Low Row near Reeth), then in Wharfedale (based in Ilkley) and last year in ‘Bronte Country’ near Haworth. In each case we combined our week in Yorkshire with a day or two staying somewhere en route to and from our home in Plymouth, or in one case a second week away in Norfolk and Suffolk. For a change, this year, we decided that we’d like to spread our holiday time out over the summer months, and so we picked a couple of fairly local destinations for ‘long weekend’ walking holidays and also booked five days over in Suffolk, combining this with a visit to elderly relatives and an old university friend on mine.

The first of our summer 2025 mini-break locations, in June, took us back to the very familiar territory (for me at least) of the Quantock Hills and the Somerset coast. I grew up a short distance from there in Bridgwater, and we would frequently go on family outings to the area. I also spent quite a lot of time at an activity centre in Kilve on short courses of various kinds (mostly musical).

Although I do like discovering new places, I also very much enjoy returning to familiar haunts, especially for a short trip when you want to be able to slot straight into holiday mode without having to spend time orienting yourself and getting the lie of the land. Our Somerset trip – staying in an AirBnB Shepherd’s Hut near the village of Crowcombe, tucked at the bottom of the western side of the Quantock Hills ridge, very much fell into this ‘familiar territory’ category.

While we were away we enjoyed completing a couple of lengthy walks direct from our accommodation (I particular enjoy a stay away that doesn’t involve having to get in the car), and I was able to spend quite a bit of time painting. In this post I’ll feature four of the pictures that I produced during the break, and I’ll pick up the thread with another post soon that will feature a further group of five pictures.

We started our holiday with lunch at a favourite cafe, the Driftwood Cafe at Blue Anchor – the subject of my first picture (shown at the top of this post). It’s not a fancy cafe at all – I’d describe it as a ham, egg and chips or baked potato cafe – it’s just a nice, simple, easy-going place for a quick bite to eat.

Suitably refueled we then drove the short distance to Kilve and did a short walk (~3 miles) along the coast to East Quantoxhead, before turning inland and returning to the car, with a stop at the Chantry Tea Garden at Kilve where we were the only customers and had an interesting conversation with the owner, who used to be a frequent visitor to Plymouth. The two pictures below show a view of a field that we passed on the return leg (I’ve got a thing for trees silhouetted on the horizon) and the view that we had from our table in the cafe garden of The Chantry itself and the white cottage from which the cafe was run.

Finally, for now, here’s a scene I painted of the view looking west in the direction of Exmoor from the base of the Quantock Hills. I’ve tried to capture the way that there are successive ‘layers’ of rolling hills as the eye moves towards the horizon, each becoming progressively just a little higher than the previous one. Although wild landscapes can be exhilarating, I do like a farmed landscape – a patchwork of fields, hedges, copses and the odd farm building.

Somerset Fields Looking West From Near Crowcombe

All of these pictures were really just quick ‘practice’ pieces, but I like them all in different ways – Driftwood Cafe for its small details, the grass-cut field for its slightly abstract form, Chantry Tea Garden for its looseness, and Somerset Fields for the way it captures something of the wide expansiveness of the view.

If you have a favourite of these four pictures write a quick comment to let me know!