Michael Lawrence : Words & Stuff

02/13/2026

PORTRAIT
A painting cut up and casually reassembled in print form.

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09/26/2025

https://tinyurl.com/5xb76umn

Book reviews by writers or independent booksellers, with occasional special features. We choose our own recommendations: fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, nature writing. We hope you'll enjoy our selections and keep coming back for more. Follow us on Facebook, X (Writersreview1) and Bluesky (...

08/31/2025

Drawings & Doodles (2020-2021)

The video's title says it all. Drawings and doodles by me during that pandemical time. I should perhaps add that I made a great many drawings (and paintings)...

04/19/2025

MODERN PRIMITIVE #18

I spent the entire August of 1983 (a very hot month) in an outdoor studio painting and pastelling twenty 30" x 40" figures that I called 'Modern Primitives' for the seemingly casual interpretation of the male and female form. I ended up destroying two of the pictures, so that this one is the last of the series. Kept in large folders for over four decades, none of the surviving eighteen have ever been publicly displayed or offered for sale. While such depictions might not be to everyone's taste (what is?) I find that I still like them, even all these years after I made them. In an ideal world (and of course there's no such thing) they would all be displayed together in a single room, on all four walls.

Selling price? Well, as I'm in no hurry to part with them I would suggest £50,000 each, or £800,000 for the entire series. (I smile as I write that.)

I could supply large prints on canvas, for quite a bit less.

If you would like to see the complete series, click this YouTube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjBdkray88Q&list

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04/18/2025

N**E ASCENDING A STEPLADDER, October 1983
Print on canvas, 31.5" x 42", £460, including p&p.

Point of reference, Marcel Duchamp's N**e Descending a Staircase, 1912.

The model for the original painting of my image (long since sold to someone from somewhere) was an American visitor who'd never done anything like this before. Once she'd had a drag or two of something illegal she became perfectly relaxed and flexible.

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11/15/2024

IMAGES FROM OBSCURITY

I’ve been making pictures of various kinds for a very long time, but have never gone out of my way to exhibit. I do love to make videos of them, though, and here’s one that shows the extended (and continuing) series that I call Photo-Graphics because they all started out as photographs, from which I’ve made graphic abstractions (some more abstract than others), printing the results of any size from A3 to something like five feet by four.

If you would like to take a peek at some of my Photo-Graphics, click the pic.

As a former professional photographer and colour printer who initially trained as a graphic designer, I often take photographs in a very unorthodox way, usin...

09/26/2024

'I AM WHAT I AM' (2024)

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09/25/2024

2 new pictures (so far untitled)

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07/27/2024

THE RAINEY SEASONS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zOlMcHUVbk&t=23s

This is a short trailer for a 630-page novel whose setting is the riverside house in which I was born; a novel primarily set in three seasons of a single year, focusing on the lives of two versions of a family by the name of Rainey. Two versions because this is a novel about variations of reality – ‘variants’, as the narrator, Linus Day, describes them.

Over several decades, Linus has visited countless variants, each one slightly different to every other. Only he knows how lives can change for better or worse in the wink of a stranger’s eye, a glance over a shoulder, the skidding of a wheel. For instance, in the course of the story we hear of Roderick Brandon Rainey, a nineteen year old soldier who, in the autumn of 1917, at the Battle of Passchendaele, stepped off a slippery duckboard and drowned in an ocean of mud – a family tragedy whose repercussions extend well into the 21st century, and beyond the present day.

The novel is available as an ebook or paperback from many online retailers, including here: www.amazon.co.uk/Rainey-Seasons-Michael-Lawrence/dp/B0CTFXG2FD

See also: http://raineylinks.com

Video soundtrack: Max Richter's 'On the Nature of Daylight'.

07/21/2024

TUSCANY DRAWINGS,1989
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh1jbFQbHgo&lis

A set of pen and ink drawings made at a German villa overlooking a verdant Tuscan valley in May and June 1989, often around five in the morning, by the first light of day. The light was good and so was the view, but my interest, as ever, was in interpretations of the human form. While still re-interpreting such forms today in various ways, I find that I still like these drawings 35 years after they were made. Not everyone's taste, perhaps, but there's no reason why they should be.

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