Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
…And the Sea Steamed
The colour of the water, paler for quite a way out from the Cuckmere River mouth as fresh water entered the ocean, was indeed steaming.
An Edge to Reality
In my work documenting decay on the English South Coast I walk with a camera and record what I see with a view to taking it into the studio to process into paintings. This is a developmental path well known since the 19th century, flowering in the 20th in the work of...
Stalled but engine running…
In my last post in November, I wrote of my mental confusion and the twists and turns I was making to find a way forward with my work. Since then, I have done plenty of work with the camera, but the problems remained unresolved. I am beginning to realise that many of...
Moving Forwards?
For a couple of months, I have struggled in the studio. Drawings based on Gropius’ house in Dessau fill sketchbook pages. Images of the trees around the ‘masters houses’ of the Bauhaus, printed out, litter my worktable. My ‘bag’ is colour of course, and like most war...
Autumn Clocks In
As October drifts to an end so we change our clocks – or not, depending in part on the clock. Clocks on computers change automatically, supposedly the car is linked to house Wi-Fi so should change with the computer but won’t, so will stay on French (or wherever) time...
Living is Easy
One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing. Yes, you'll spread your wings, and you'll take to the sky. But 'til that morning, there's nothing can harm you....
Away with the Faeries
Bore Da as they say in Wales. Good morning Some of us honour our roots, our predecessors and their construction of the Judeo-Christian culture in which we live. It expresses itself in many ways and yesterday I went on one of my favourite memory walks through a copse....
Mark Making
There was only radio for entertainment for many of my early years. I have written before of how my father taught me to draw. My formative years were spent in physical exploration of woods and fields, making model aeroplanes and filling books with drawings. Aged six...
Empires End
“You guys have no idea how painful it is to have been young during the absolute peak era of the greatest empire in human history and now be forced to watch it all unravel. The saddest part is that we are doing it to ourselves. Absolutely agonizing experience. Like...
Morning Prayers
One of the first things I do in the morning in my every day routine is as I come downstairs, I turn right while the cat sits and waits, posing. He knows what I’m doing, I’m going to turn on the computer and collect the camera from the office. I then return past the...
In Slater’s Footsteps
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas With the addition of a photographic record of decay, the four books of images of paintings and...
Mary Watts
Mary who? I tried to find her in my art reference books. Mary Seton Watts, wife of the Victorian establishment painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904), and he is definitely in the books. First British artist to have a gallery devoted just to him, it...
A Garden Studio
We moved to the seaside when my partner retired as she was born in this area and waited tables in a local caff as a teenager, having happy memories of the coast. Her roots were here, whereas my RAF upbringing wedded my heart and soul to England but not to any one...
Emma Stibbon at the Towner.
Now the Turner prize has gone, and we have our gallery back. Still not free of the corrosive Arts Council social work arts programme, but ignore the excrescence on the ground floor, despite its claim using the Bayeux Tapestry to justify the size of its awfulness. No,...
Henry V – lessons from history
I’ve just been reading Juliet Barkers analysis of Agincourt. Not as entertaining as Bernard Cornwell’s story (he uses her research) but far more detailed and informative of reality. Recently we have spent much time denying the relevance of history to current events,...
Morning
It tickles my cheek, this flicking furry tail. I snake a hand out from under the duvet and rub his head. Fumbling, I struggle to see the luminous glowing hands on my watch face. 05.55. Early but light is coming under the curtains and cat is doing the ‘I’m starving’...
An English Village
There are, apparently, 3 churches in Sussex with round flint Saxon towers. I am constantly passing two, the charming little church in the hamlet that is Southease , and, glimpsed as I drive by over the flint walls and behind conical building which I took to be an...
Westward Ho!
The only town in Britain whose name ends in an exclamation mark sits on the North Devon coast. Nearby is the beautiful little town of Bideford, perhaps one of the most beautiful places I have visited in recent years. It was here in the 19th century that the novel...
Sussex Lakes?
As the rain continues, one commentator remarked that “Alfriston is afloat”. Flooding from the Cuckmere is commonplace around the village and its church, the ‘Cathedral of the South Downs’, and only increases as the Environment Agency allows the sea defences at the...
Looking Ahead
Do all artists go through creatively sterile patches? Maybe it’s a bit of creative exhaustion having made and exhibited so many paintings based in the decay of local sea defences, or maybe it is my increasing physical handicaps, but I haven’t been in the studio...
Childhood in the 1950’s
Recently my partner and I took a drive into deepest Devon, so deep we stood on a Hartland cliff looking at the Bristol Channel. My mother hailed from Devon, although that was south Devon. She was born in ‘John’s Cottage’ in Churston near Torquay, and one of my uncles...
Whatever happened to what’s his name?
Shortly after, the politicians went mad and the establishment, perhaps jealous or threatened by the success of the nouveau companies inspired by Thatcher’s market driven approach, set about destroying her and the success she had engendered and the many nascent ambitious companies that her policies had allowed to grow energetically.
Bruised Cruise
Fantasy is sunshine and calm seas. Last time going up the North Sea, waves covered our porthole on occasion. Here as we left Pompey, the balcony furniture was lashed down securely (the British Fleet similarly lashed down by scaffold poles, I noticed). A sister ship had been battered by storms, and it seemed we could expect the same. To my disappointment it was a boring unspectacular four days of sea
Whether Man and His Cat
Once Upon a Time there was a writer of fairy tales, Hands Christian Andiscat. Known as the ‘whether-man’, every day he would emerge from beneath his warm bedding and wrapped in his dressing gown Hans would sally forth into the garden where he would try to feel whether...