I use the camera a great deal. It replaces a sketchbook most of time, as it does for many artists, whilst I notice many photographers frequently use a small sketch book before taking their photographs. One tribe trained purely to see, maybe not as technically ‘deep’, the other tribe superbly technically competent and maybe needs to self reassure with their looking, to see clearly before snapping. Me? I’m just a happy snapper, confident the camera has better technical brains than I. I grab what I see with the camera as I see it, looking for colour and beauty, and I don’t think I do badly for an amateur snapper. Then I take it further into artworks.
I love William Morris’ recommendation to only have in your house that which enhances its beauty. It is difficult these days, given how manufacturing values profit above aesthetics and given the poor quality of our visual education now, both part of the visual impoverishment that has come with some much industrialization. I wonder if Elon Musk has refined a set of algorithms for his robots so that they follow the William Morris strictures, or is it all just mechanical efficiency – as the ugly Cybertruck suggests. Forgive me Elon, you may be a tech guru and your rockets are wonderful, but I think I am more of an art/design guru than you are… 
I live with a lovely lady whose aesthetic sense is not the same as mine, so our home is a mixture of compromises, comfortable, sometimes chaotic (such as now as accumulating work for a solo show puts piles everywhere) with occasional patches of calm beauty. We have an old wine fridge sitting in a corner of the kitchen where white wines live, and I have screwed some wine racking onto the larder wall for a few reds to lie down. I barely drink a bottle of red in a week, and having a screw top bottle sitting on the kitchen worktop is hardly stylish now, is it? So when my eye was caught by a ship’s crystal decanter sitting for sale cheaply in a secondhand shop I bought it.
This morning, with spring sunshine streaming though the kitchen window, the decanter delivered some unintentional beauty more than justifying replacing the bottle. I had noticed it before but this morning’s opportunity was too good to miss and developed into a mini photoshoot in the kitchen, the results of which present here ‘for your delectation and delight’ as the Victorian music hall introduction would have it.
No the mages are not Ai, as a visual artist I abhor the machine manipulation of reality. The lack of visual education impoverishes. Teaching seeing has never been taught as language is taught (and I can hear language teachers saying we don’t teach languages anymore, and English teachers bemoaning the woke identities foisted onto Shakespearean characters) all part of the dumbing down of the proles. Lack of proper education leads to a population easily beguiled by slick political or commercial imagery cleverly designed to bypass their brain and draw directly of their emotions.
My beautiful decanter comes from an age where Morris’s dictum had some impact on manufacturing. Its colour when filled with wine in the sunlit kitchen drew my eye and stimulated me to create/grab images of the beauty. Look around your home as the sun shines in and look for its beauty. Use your eyes and find your own aesthetic sensibility find meaning in what you have created around you – by trying you will begin the path to discovering your own inner artist and develop the ability to see through manipulation.
Me? I just see red rather a lot….
See my seeing next in the one-man show at Gallery UNO in Seaford, 9th– 19th April 2026
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