Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
A Conversation about Drawing
Drawing processes have changed over time. From cotton grids, camera obscura, photographs and now the computer artists have always used machines to aid accuracy – maybe even Turner
An artist’s eyes – symbolism?
Getting old is combatted in part by staying active and engaged both physically and mentally. Now women can run faster than me, the physical is represented by ambling with a camera wherever the fancy takes me. I have a target gleaned from a Chinese exercise site where...
Turner at the Towner
Without a large oil painting this exhibition seduces, draws in close and gentle, sucks you into the artist’s handiwork. These pieces are precious from Cotman, Girtin, Hind and others, portraying the entrance to docks, ships, storms and pieces of Sussex to strike recognition as well as seducing through the eye. They contrast neatly with the illustrator designer that was Ravillious, their subtle seduction contrasting with his declarative picture making. You’ll need time to submerge yourself in the delights both galleries present.
That’s Life
Pleasures must be paid for, and politicians steal other people’s successes to build their own monuments. Many suffered as I did, but I also became an orphan and broke. My marriage broke, my father died, my design practice failed. But the human spirit in an artist is steel, we bend not break, survive and continue to create, as many artists have demonstrated in the past.
Ravillious Revisited at the Towner
There has been a Ravillious room at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery for quite a long time. Reworking now in a generous and long overdue space liberated by the addition of new galleries downstairs breathes new life into appreciating his short-lived genius.
The Ponderwall
It started with the weather images. Today I take them with a sophisticated digital camera but I started them in pre-digital times as small gouache paintings done very quickly and very small from my back doorstep
Standen – an age of innovation
Like many a great piece of design everything here is a product of a singular design practice, Morris and Webb. Wallpapers, carpets, the totality of the fixtures and fittings is a celebration of the arts and Crafts movement so strongly espoused by Morris
A Garden Start
The colour flows from the movement of hand and arm allied to brainwork developing the ideas the eye has created in the mind, The gesture with pain carries the unconscious and conscious vision
Death of a Poppy
I see in my garden testaments of time passing. It is an interplay between a connoisseur’s knowledge of art, a photographer’s searching vision, my aesthetic values and a sense of mortality.
Cultured Memories at Eltham Palace
Eltham Palace from playground for Tudor royalty to home for a 1930’s industrialist now a tourist attraction and a domestic design masterpiece
Passwords
now we have password systems which need password systems themselves to protect the protections that protect our passwords. To change the password I need to download another piece of software, which requires me to use my mobile phone to download a number key so that I can unlock it to get the code to unlock the password
Back to the Future?
The world shifts and we roll backwards into a new future path, so my painting must follow my heart there too. Once more into the breach…
Colour
The first rose, what a moment to savour. Will incomers to this country ever feel the special joy that brings to an Englishman? Watching blooms form on the chestnut – being teased that red flowers marked the female chestnuts, white flowers the boys – and you know that it is the Spanish form with its different leaves are the ones that you can roast in the autumn – the conkers are to be strung for championship fights and bashed knuckles.
Stepping Out
In an earlier essay on here I wrote about ‘Following in Slaters Footsteps’ which may have been seen to imply I copy what he did. That would not be terribly creative would it? No, I follow his footsteps as he walked Seaford and the Cuckmere from where he lived, just up...
A Garden
Ten of the thirty-one days in March we had frosts, but bumblebees have been around for a couple of weeks, and I saw my first caterpillar of the year and heard the first skylark on the Down above the town
New Steps
How is it that eating a plate of corned beef hash can result in a gain of 2 pounds weight? Admittedly it was a large portion, cooked myself, with a few baked beans on the side, but it blew my weight loss out the window! So now I need to set about trying to walk it off (forlorn hope, better a fasting day…) It was a beautiful day, so I set off to walk my challenge, the walk down to the Coast Guard cottages on the Cuckmere from South Barn
Beauty and the Creative Process
… 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.
The Death Sting
I walk with a camera, sometime with my partner, sometime 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.
You Can See the Seven Sisters from Newhaven
So Newhaven slumbers on, the most exciting development being where industries have left because of the failure to move with the time by the authorities, and where the latest investment has gone into the refurbishing of the giant Palmerston fort guarding its entrance
Storm Winds
I snuggle under the duvet and remember when I once stood watch as a volunteer in the coast watch tower further along the coast. That day was a real storm, blowing hard, wind howling through the railings like a demented banshee as we climbed the steps to the tower.
…And the Sea Steamed
The colour of the water, paler for quite a way out from the Cuckmere River mouth as fresh water entered the ocean, was indeed steaming.
An Edge to Reality
In my work documenting decay on the English South Coast I walk with a camera and record what I see with a view to taking it into the studio to process into paintings. This is a developmental path well known since the 19th century, flowering in the 20th in the work of many artists
Stalled but engine running…
In my last post in November, I wrote of my mental confusion and the twists and turns I was making to find a way forward with my work. Since then, I have done plenty of work with the camera, but the problems remained unresolved. I am beginning to realise that many of...
Moving Forwards?
For a couple of months, I have struggled in the studio. Drawings based on Gropius’ house in Dessau fill sketchbook pages. Images of the trees around the ‘masters houses’ of the Bauhaus, printed out, litter my worktable. My ‘bag’ is colour of course, and like most war...