Readers of my 280+ blog posts will have followed my travails through cancer, spinal injuries, arthritis etc as I have worked with camera and paintbrush to respond to the beauty of our world. I have sought beauty even as England allows decay to rule in a wanton splurging of our gold to gain favour elsewhere. The destruction of our state continues as complacent rulers follow their own cruel agendas. My solace has been producing artworks/photographs/essays recording this process.
For years I enjoyed educating young minds on seeing the world, encouraging them to share their vision through their art as designers/animators/fine artists/educators. I spent more years educating designers about hotels, reaching a global audience, sometimes over 100 thousand people a day, with criticism and praise, photographs, descriptions of design at all levels in the hospitality world. Paralleling Morris’s words of the home, nothing should be in an hotel unless it enhances the guest experience – including, as Olga Polizzi pointed out, smiling staff.
With ageing and illness I sought refuge in my studio, creating art that continued my critical looking, now mostly at my part of Britain, recording its beauty in decay and neglect by those paid substantial sums to keep it looking as good as its past. As I am failing in health through ageing, so they fail through wanton waste and incompetence. The noise of criticism, the barracking and dissent levels, all rise but the only response is to spend more wealth trying to right wrongs elsewhere by opening doors to the undeserving poor and donating our hard earned cash to corrupt organisations in richer countries.
Once again war clouds hang on the horizon. Enemies are emboldened, our rulers party and indulge themselves, closing their eyes and minds to the decay within and threats abroad in favour of massaging their own egos. My ageing carcass is decaying in parallel, and the mental pain I have from seeing my country rot is paralleled by my own physical pain and decay. It has now reached the point where working in the studio is becoming difficult due to pain levels and physical disability. Our much vaunted health service is prolonging my life for now, although our overlords are passing laws that will no doubt enable me to be killed off next time I am in hospital, because that will be the cheapest solution.
I fall back on tools that demand less physical engagement. Walking has been advised for health as a gym routine is no longer possible, so I walk with a camera, sometime with my partner, sometimes accompanied by a man and his dog but mostly alone, looking for the delights of man and nature. My painting is paused whilst I try to figure a way of working that will not challenge my body. I think of Matisse working in bed aided of course by nubile nymphs (my nymph ages with me); I think of Marcel Duchamp announcing he is no longer creating art, just dedicating his late years to playing chess – I could just play out time on the pensioners favourite game ‘Candy Crush’ which claims billions of games are played daily. Not going to happen.
I have produced four books on my recent work – no words, just images printed as giclée limited edition prints and bound. I have in mind the germ of a fifth. They are for sale and a couple have gone, but like any artwork, sale is a nice bonus, the real joy is in creating. Having spent over 60years making art (some of which was used by mother to block a hole in the fence to stop the dog getting out) I don’t know how to stop now. Maybe the studio will become a summer studio when the arthritis in my hands will be less of a problem. Photographs will work as prints and will be freely shared on the web, because it gives me pleasure, as well as, I hope, pleasuring others.
It is my faith, this drive to share the beauty of the world as I see it. My ‘raison d’etre’. It is a form of worship. I feel I little more than a carrier vessel, a conduit, through which the beauty flows into the world. Of course it may all be dross, in which case let it be piled up to make my funeral pyre. For me the work is like a prayer, offered up to the deity – hopefully I will know whether Thor, Zeus, JC, or simply the Void – it matters not to you. Hopefully you will gain from all and any art but will give mine a look. Learn to look and love the world. When I take my morning weather image I stop, listen to the crows’ caw, the magpies cackle, the song of the robin and blackbird, the cat’s purr. I smell a damp morning, feel a frost, the warmth of the sun on summer day, the scent of the garden plants. All is free, all threatened by unthinking littering/solar panels/wild windmills/pollution but mostly by our fellow citizens. Treat the world kindly. Enhance its beauty, do not despoil it.
You matter. Don’t hide, engage with the powerful. Be active not passive, you are my inheritors. Please care for our beautiful country, don’t allow its further despoilation. Now I must stop. I hope I wake tomorrow to do more.
All good things come to an end though, don’t they?
The images I share here are from one of my latest ambles on this occasion accompanied by One Man and his Dog
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