Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane

 

Art Educated?

Art Educated?

19th Century educationalists saw the need for centres of innovative, creative thought to add to the inventive technical prowess of the English and buttress the manufacturing with design and innovation. So those clever Victorians created the local art colleges to be centres of revolutionary thinking in all their local manufacturing communities.

Silver Sheets

Silver Sheets

The colour of the sky varied but it was its pellucid blue that enticed me to the seafront where I was fascinated by the silver sheets the surf laid down on the orange-brown of the shingle, accompanied by soft susurrations as the surf withdrew

Weather Watched

Weather Watched

The routine includes the cat of course, and can provide a moment of stillness, of prayer, in the flow of the day. In the last couple of years, I have added a limited commentary (limited by the number of characters the Beeb allows) to my observations, data fed by a local weather station and observation. I am exploring how the imagery can reflect time. I have been playing with the images, merging them to show a week in one shot, and then maybe four weeks merged to show a month, and (most fun) four months, one from each season, to show a year.

Invisibility

Invisibility

my work is changing. I have started photographing the town itself, and for a while put a series of images on social media showing places I have been around the world and contrasting them with Seaford, a series labelled Seaford and Not Seaford. Now I’m looking at woodland and the Downs, (only the English would call their hills ’downs’). I am also working with images of the local harbour in Newhaven and the pollution the fishing in dusty generates. What I am seeing really is the beauty of life in this very English corner of the country, responding to its beauty before it vanishes

South Barn

South Barn

South Barn It has been a dry hot summer. The Barn is known for having no heating, not being wind proof, sometimes not even waterproof, and today there is one of those miserable damp misty sea fret sort of days. Perched on Seaford Head the rest of the South Downs...

To The Woods

To The Woods

I visit the wood infrequently, but it is one of my favourite havens where I can feed my soul with its silence and beauty. Alongside the prints of my photographs of the sea defences from which so much of my painting has sprung in the last few years, sit a few of the images of the oaks.

Marine Growth

Marine Growth

It’s been a tough year. Is that what happens as one ages – each year gets tougher? Physically I have always tried to exercise, even buying a share in a central London gym once at the height of the gym investment craze. Great place to exercise. Went bust of course. I...

A Renaissance

A Renaissance

My processing also starts with traditional visual ideas, with looking, then progressing maybe from drawings, more often from digital photographs which I crop, process and alter on the computer before drawing to refine/define further, taking onto a larger scale through works on paper and then distil onto my larger scale canvases. The camera technology has changed rapidly over the last 30 years, become a ubiquitous tool and creating whole new areas of creative endeavour in much the way technical changes made possible so much of the work of Renaissance artists once they were able to work on canvas with oil paints.

Pigeons’ Luck

Pigeons’ Luck

I sat in the garden thinking (I do that a lot, maybe too much) and remembering the trip to the South African Delaire vineyard to see one of the most popular iconic paintings of the 1950’s and 60’s. Some say it rivals the Mona Lisa as a painting…(cough)… I remember...

Green as Grass

Green as Grass

Green is the dominant colour in the garden against which flower blossom glow, but the daisies, scattered in the long grasses hold their own in this beauty contest, the gold of the Archimedean spiral at their centres sitting among white petals that often turn to pink darkening to red at their tips. They have grown tall in competition with the grasses, thriving in competition, and the grasses themselves have started to become identifiable as they mature to generate seed heads. The biggest shock seems to me to be the inability of the dandelions to compete in this new muscular grassland.

Blue 2 Infinity

Blue 2 Infinity

I started to look at definitions of ‘Blue’ in writing the previous blog on the colour.  My 1954 dictionary (a thick tome I grew up using after dad bought the dictionary and the 8 volume ‘Book of Knowledge’ from a door-to-door salesman) states “Ancient colour words are...

Blue

Blue

“In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art” “In order to use colour effectively it is necessary to recognise that colour deceives continually” “It should be learned...

Apple Blossom Time

Apple Blossom Time

The super-rich may buy islands but for most some personal mobility was a blessing – but also a curse as children moved further away from parents and family support mechanisms broke down. The ‘nuclear family’ as a concept seems to be under threat. A younger generation now needs to redefine family and nationality, bearing in mind that the behaviour of Russians shows that national characteristics remain immutable. Or maybe the value of their individuality will rise, driven by porn, bestial like. above love and family to consume all notions of society.

Knock Knockin’

Knock Knockin’

Mama, take this badge off of me I can't use it anymore It's gettin' dark, too dark to see I feel I'm knockin' on heaven's door Bob Dylan  Several of us on Twitter and Facebook keep a daily visual diary of the changing months. I take mine from the same spot...

March March

March March

"March March to my own drum, March march to my own drum Hey hey I’m an army of one Oh i‘m an army of one Tell the ol’ boys in the white bread lobby What they can and can’t do with their bodies Temperatures are rising, cities are sinkin’ Ah cut the shit" Dixie Chicks...

A Bit of a Blow

A Bit of a Blow

Its quieter now. We are I guess, some 400 yards from the beach, and the persistent thunder, a little like traffic noise, has gone. The sun is shining, and the weathermen and women can stop panicking until the next stiff breeze comes along. My admiration for those who...

Fisherman’s Tackle

Fisherman’s Tackle

The last of this set (but not the end of the series) worked the net more loosely . There is a conflict between my desire to tread that line between reality and abstraction that gives me a problem with taking this larger, and the canvas may well end up being destroyed.

Loss of Innocence

Loss of Innocence

The world is in a permanent flux as technologies change the way we live and work, communicate, and manage our interpersonal relationships. The loss of innocence has accelerated generation by generation, but the increased availability of information and knowledge has generally led to people living in ‘silos’. What do I mean by this? Let me illustrate.

Making a Painting Video

My latest in the 'Making a Painting' series on my YouTube channel can be seen on my YouTube channel https://youtu.be/TJPOOLZvXIc It features what will be the third and fourth  on the 'Fishermans Tackle' obsession as showed in the Cuckmere show in the Barn on Seaford...

Morning

Morning

Downstairs I collect the camera and then realise I can still see the stars brightly – the Plough is low in the sky as is the sun when it is around, throwing its long shadows. I decide to delay, and instead I clean the kitchen and make an early coffee. I watch the horizon slowly lighten and spot a light, bright, moving along the top of the Down. A dog walker with a torch perhaps? The morning weather image can wait until there is a bit more light, the really dark mornings are messing with the imagery making it as one observer noted, a blue period for morning photos. At least this morning it’s not raining, and it is surprisingly warm at 8 degrees, despite the clear sky which normally in December would denote a frost.

Doorway into Dreams

Doorway into Dreams

In my last piece To See or Not to See I talked about photography. It was of course the driver behind much of the change in artistic perception, from Muybridge to commercial soap adverts (Bubbles), all building and subtly altering the way people see or use their...

To See or Not to See

To See or Not to See

This is an image made by merging  from one day on Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn into a composite photo of the year 2020. A bit like an acid trip, it shows how the imagination can be more powerful that any drug – and as addictive

Trusting or Rusting?

Trusting or Rusting?

For over eighteen months I have been working from images of my local sea defences, fascinated by the complexities of colour and texture generated by their decay. Sheet metal supposedly protecting the concrete structure that in turn protects a sewer treatment outfall,...

An Artist’s Statement

An Artist’s Statement

I first started using a camera ‘as a lad’ and sold my first photograph to an American collector when I was 17, back when images were recorded on film and had to be printed out on paper. I still print the images I use on paper, but now as giclée’s at A2 or A3 on art papers. The camera I used has a large sensor which allows me to enormously enlarge images. This enables me to focus in on small sections and blow them up to examine the textures and colour in a way that I can’t do on an electronic screen.