Mountain Girl

Last year, while we were on holiday in Ireland, I heard this mesmerising old time song on the radio - a woman singing plaintively over what sounded like a dulcimer drone backing - and strained to hear who it was by. I discovered the artist was Jean Ritchie and did a bit of research on her. Now in her 90s she was brought up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and, because there was no radio out there, her family would sing their old songs and tell stories, many old ballads brought from Britain by her ancestors. Jean became a dulcimer player - the Appalachian lap version (not the banjo-ey thing that I bought off the internet from some hippy website in California ten or more years ago).

My source for the painting was a famous black and white photo of the young Jean playing her dulcimer. However, for some reason I also appear to be channeling the actress Kate Beckinsale. Don’t know what’s going on there. The picture is done in what I think of as high folk-art style – so any subtle use of colour is purely unintentional.