My work comes about often from various angles - personal or observed combined with other things. Donkeys have always fascinated me, and elicited my sympathies (more than horses)...possibly the root of it is my mum would take me and Pat to see one every day in the special pre-school years when we were in each other’s company all day (this is why I’ve subtitled it August 1974). She died a couple of years ago and I think I painted it as a form of eulogy to her. Robert Louis Stevenson came into my thinking - his book travels with a donkey where he describes sleeping under the stars in southern France.. (originally there was a lying figure at the bottom but this got painted out)...then there is the sweetness and a kind of darkness of his poems in ‘a child’s garden of verse’. As David Lynch says in one of his interviews when explaining why so many of his films use the stars “the stars are there for everyone...and they make you dream”...