Winter Updates

December 2025

Updates and News

My new show Fragments and Form opened at Jonathan Cooper Gallery in Chelsea this month. It has been nice to see all the pieces together and I’ve received some lovely feedback from collectors. Femme Magazine did a feature on my work for their Winter edition so if you find a copy do have a read through. I wrote an article for the magazine called From Arena to Atelier: The Rise of the Rider-Collector about my experience of working in equestrian art and what contemporary collectors of art are looking for. I’ll post the article here in the new year but for now you can only find it in the Femme Winter Edition.

I’m really looking forward to the New Year. My exhibition will close for the winter break and it will give me a chance to start January afresh with new ideas and new projects. I hope to spend the first few months of 2026 working in my studio experimenting with some ideas and concepts that I’ve had for a while but not had the chance to explore. I want to take more creative risks next year and develop something quite radically new. This means spending time in the studio experimenting with no preconceived expectations or constraints.

I hope you are as excited for the New Year as I am. In the meantime please enjoy a selection of images of my current work in progress pieces alongside some images from my recent exhibition.

Joseph x

New Work

The Shrine of Themis, 2025

I’m currently working on a few new botanical paintings. One recently completed piece I delivered to the gallery yesterday which they will be exhibiting in New York for the Winter Show in January. I’ve written a short piece below about the painting and some of the ideas behind it.

The Shrine of Themis is mentioned in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in Book XI, specifically lines 11-14. The reference serves as an allusion to Greek mythology, namely the Goddess of justice Themis. In Book XI, Adam and Eve, having sinned, offer prayers of repentance. The narrator describes their prayers as being as significant and earnest as those of the ‘ancient pair, Deucalion and Pyrrha’, the only survivors of a great wave of destruction sent by Zeus. The comparison offers a note of hope that they too will be survivors of a great cosmic change, destined to build the world anew. In the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, their prayers to Themis were rewarded with guidance on how to rebuild after a period of destruction.

In the painting the three bright flowers have begun to show signs of deterioration. A slight wilting and discolouration of the petals hint at the inevitable decay of the flowers that nevertheless currently bloom in a vivid display of colour. The imagery of flowers is central to the symbolic depiction of Eden in Paradise Lost. Further on in Book XI, Adam laments about leaving the garden he has tended to in Eden;

O flowers,

That never will in other climate grow,

My early visitation, and my last

At even, which I bred up with tender hand

From the first opening bud

Though Milton does not further describe the flowers physically withering, he shows how their symbolic role had changed to become reminders of a paradise lost. A sense of hope however is central to Milton’s writing. In this case the allusion to Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the Shrine of Themis, serves as a reminder to preserver through periods of destruction and renewal. I think there is also an allusion to the nature of mutual support and cooperation.

The vase in which the flowers are placed is a form of ancient Greek pottery known as a lèbes gamikòs. The vase was traditionally filled with water and used in marriage ceremonies. After the collapse of Eden, Milton repeatedly shows that cooperation becomes a means of survival and renewal. This theme is of course clearest in the partnership of Adam and Eve. Before the Fall, they work in harmonious unity, suggesting that human flourishing depends on shared labor. When destruction arrives however, their unity momentarily breaks; accusation replaces support, and their bond seems to collapse under the weight of individual guilt.

Yet it is precisely in this moment of ruin that cooperation re-emerges as a source of healing. After their initial blame and despair, Adam and Eve turn back to one another, choosing solidarity rather than isolation.