Winter retreats. At the first opportunity I take my coffee into the garden to sit in the sun, watching the frost melt off the grass (almost as exciting as things get around here). I sit there not just soaking up sunshine but looking at the rich greens of the grass, looking at new growth, noting life returning in the form of bees, hoverflies and birds gathering nesting materials – and it is not meteorological spring officially for two more weeks.
Listening and smelling because the garden is full of subtle scents from flowering bushes. The snowdrops are disappearing being replaced by oodles of daffs. Daphnia bushes either side of the garden give the scent, and the increasing amount of birdsong makes a musical back note. New primed surfaces are taking shape in the studio as photography takes the spotlight but doesn’t replace paint
As I look around I see little snapshots of colour to collect to add to my mental colour filing index. The cat sits next to me and his image gets gathered in too. He doesn’t bother me he just lies down on the bench and purrs, showing me how he can lick his nose… It’s not exactly watching the world go by sitting in a garden, but visual curiosity is the engine driver of my creativity and there is so much to see in the daily changes in a simple garden.
Can you lick your nose?
As I sit in silence the fluttering of an unseen bird’s wing is so close I momentarily mistake it for the flutter of an angel’s wing. I suppose like many old folk I wonder about the nature of death and the possible after life but I take such pleasure in just relaxing and enjoying the beautiful garden with the company of my cat that there is no fear in such thoughts. Behind me is a life of achievement, but my days of striving to increase magazine readership are behind and long gone. I think it was quite an achievement to reach 102,000 daily readers, now I search solace in paint.
Broken Nets – fishing nets or the internets. look beyond imagery
Now I use X with1500 followers (where once I had many thousands of twitter followers) to show the beauty of my world and to show my reactions to it in my artwork. I have an average around 200 people visiting a day and often 2000 pages read which is a lot for a small blog like mine and for a personal blog too, but then beauty seems to have little value in a world growing uglier every day so the number pleases if it is beauty they seek.
Bergen Harbour
I supplement the garden inputs by walks looking for colour and texture in the everyday. It was the walks with curiosity that led to the BRotS series which have been a focus for the last four years, and they have led, through the Fishermans Tackle group of works to exploring more the colour and texture of the local fishing industry, with Newhaven’s nearby small fleet a renewed focus. Not a particularly new focus for me as some may recall my Harbour series where boats and reflections from Tacoma, Bergen and Cape Town have all been the focus of artworks pre-dating Seaford’s decaying ‘pier’.
I’m working on larger sheets of paper again, (Bockingford art paper) stapled to the studio walls and primed with gesso. Sheets of cartridge have led to canvases in the past but these current exploration works are larger and may well be the finished pieces, as long ago the memorial Verdun oil pastel triptych pieces were (now in the collection of the history department of an English Public School). A past Director of Eastbourne’s Towner gallery once said my larger works made ‘her heart sing’. I’ll be happy if the new work makes mine sing for me. To get to that point there is a constant need to overcome the physical problems ageing brings.
Verdun – Blood and Earth
I shall not be exhibiting again, the disruption is too much – unless of course invited somewhere, a little excitement doesn’t go amiss. Generally now I am content in my garden to realise my ‘muse’ and increasingly depressed when I see the poor quality of many exhibitions- even major shows at places like London’s Tate frequently are regurgitations of shows from the 1970’s and 80’s interpreted through the current self-indulgent zeitgeist, a zeitgeist that seems increasingly rejected by younger culturally aware who recognise its dishonesty.
Snapshot of a crocus in a pot, a slightly surreal colour relationship
I think we are long overdue a reappraisal of the inheritance of the Bauhaus and its impact on British arts in the 60’s and 70’s, but the exuberance combined with the ruthless emphasis on disciplines of drawing etc. doesn’t sit well with the electronic generation of visual thieves playing with creating through their keyboards. Instead of visually searching beauty through use of their eyes in the real world now many look for the excitement of an artificial reality created through AI and computer generated imagery. They are often unable to distinguish electron from real atoms, so badly visually educated are they in our school system.
Maybe the thrall of the machine, its contents an invented world in which love is pornographic not poetic, a world in which the body is fed but not the soul, will be the destruction of our civilisation, reality breaking in with barbarians carrying knives to give a thorough cleansing to our self-indulgence.
Have then we forgotten how to live, as we sit on the sofa surfing with their keyboards? Prove me wrong… Meanwhile I will continue to find wonder in the world around me, just don’t ask me to define beauty as that is another story
I have written about the Bauhaus and its impact in a series in the blog on this site. Here are the hyperlinks, in order they were written:
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