Simon Goss

During the frustrating periods when the weather is too poor to go outside to paint, I sometimes turn to still life. My latest batch of work is a series of larger than life conker paintings. The humble Horse Chestnut holds many a memory for me in its warm, reflective surface. Redolent of school days, they are lumped in with drizzle, bonfires and the cordite tang of sparklers in my mind's Autumnal reference library. As children we collected and treated them to a variety of experimental processes to try and produce a champion conker. They would be baked and pickled, polished and hammered to try to gain an advantage over other boys' efforts. When sufficiently hardened, we would drill and thread them onto an old bootlace ready to be swung with as much force as possible at an opponent's dangling prize. My knuckles still throb at the memory of the ones that missed.