Dad retired from producing artwork on commission in the early 2000s and has since painted more for pleasure, returning at times to perhaps his greatest love, aviation painting.
The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War gave dad the opportunity to paint again some of the old favourites from that conflict and a particularly poignant picture from 2013, in my view one of his best later works, shows a flight of Royal Flying Corps B.E.2a aircraft – ‘the First of the Few’ – crossing the Channel in August 1914 in support of the British Expeditionary Force. Only a small handful of the aircraft crossing the Channel in that fateful flight survived for more than two or three months.
While dad has become less interested of late in painting the technicalities of shipping, it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm to paint the sea and in recent years shorescapes have provided an interesting change of subject matter, occasionally with small figures in the foreground delving into rockpools that bear an uncanny resemblance to lesser Cross family members!