The latest in the Geranium series of drawings – a collage of photographic giclee image and oil pastels
The British NHS is a bit like flypaper. Once it wraps itself around you there is no escape. Don’t get me wrong – the Health Service saved my life as a child in the 1950’s with an early application of antibiotics, despite my apparently being at death’s door. It helped me beat type 2 diabetes (although OH’s diet control was most important there) and now it is (hopefully) helping me beat cancer (see cancer), so I am very grateful not to be at the mercy of any insurance company profit margin.
Varnishing with a matt varnish before taking to the framers for framing.
Currently I am in a spell of wait and see, with a minor operation scheduled for the beginning of May to see if the cancer really has gone (fingers crossed). But that doesn’t mean they are letting go. Oh no! Now I am attending a weekly support session. I initially went under protest but to my surprise the sessions are putting me back in touch with a self that has for years been held down by running businesses. Much if what I learned, in philosophical terms, as an art student had become overlaid with the thinking and philosophies needed to run successful businesses – design practice and then the on-line journal that is Hotel Designs.
A2 sized giclee print. Greenfly almost like cancer on the lupins
I never lost creativity, but it expressed itself in functional ways – the design of carpets, light fittings, interiors generally, and through photography and writing. I make no claim to being a photographer, just being a happy snapper really, but I do have an artist’s eye. What the support sessions are doing is bringing my awareness as an artist back to the top of my mind, connecting again with my soul. It is helped by having a studio for the last year and my working routine now gives me three or four hours a day minimum working there, and painting again has rekindled the passion for art.
Drawings and paintings, photographs being cropped and manipulated into strong images have led to the extension of this blog into a website in itself. Here I will continue to write about whatever strikes me as important to my creativity but it will primarily be about my making art.
One of my photograsphs rendered as a giclee print for sale in the shop
The site will eventually subsume the blog, but will have much more about my painting etc.. A section headed ‘Art’ will show past artworks. There is a contact page, and my new email link is there too. This blog has its own section where the archive is repeated. For the moment the blog and the new website will run side by side. The website is more or less complete, although it is still a work in progress, and I will be adding more to it as time permits.
Another of my favourite images available as a giclee print limited edition through the shop, lupins have been a painterly obsession for years, form the basis of the Morley mural and a number of paintings now in private collection.
Art is a language and all language is about communication. It takes a transmitter and a receiver, and all art needs an audience as without an audience it is like a proverbial tree falling in a forest… so the website is my new stage on which my performances in the studio can be critically measured.
My current work will feature in the shop/gallery, where you can buy if the urge takes you. For the last week I have been tuning and writing, trying to produce an entertaining and attractive website for you. I hope you like it, and your feedback is very welcome. So go, look and critique. The images here are some of the things you will see – and I have a one-man show coming up in October 2016– and that’s another blog, of course…
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