Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
Honeysuckle Fun
Analysing colour and form through photography and drawing . Honeysuckle the subject, mixing the digital image and the auto-graphic mark
Walking Wounded
The dangers of physical and emotional ‘burn-out’ for the creative mind. Creativity needs nurturing. As Picasso is supposed to have said, ‘artists are the elite of the servant classes’ but need treating with respecrt
Paint’n Place
From Monet to Hockney – recognising that location is important to an artist’s oeuvre. Examples from my own art over the years reflecting Lancashire, London and Sussex
Silly Season in Seaford
The frenzy started when a photographer for the Mirror saw the pictures. Although on a holiday he lives in Seaford and has himself linked into the local Coastguard, so he saw the images straight away. He rang me and persuaded me that the Mirror should have the pics ahead of any other national media, but said it was OK to respond to any local enquiries. From there it spiralled.
In Praise of Colour
February Canon announced their 50 megapixel 5Ds. I was unable to resist a camera that promised Hasselblad quality images in such a familiar package. I skipped the 5Dmk3 because I though as an upgrade from the mk2 it didn’t offer enough to justify the cost over its predecessor. Not the case with the 5Ds. The results after just two weeks of use are challenging me to rethink what I am doing with photography.
Bridget Riley at the De La Warr Pavilion
The exhibition at the de La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-0n-Sea explores Riley’s development in a linear way from the initial disturbingly disorienting black and white images through more disturbing curvilinear colour work to the calmer more lyrical recent works.
Honeysuckle Sun
First step always these days is the camera, which I use instead of drawing. This image was taken with a Canon 100mm macro lens, which is stunning for flower pics. The range of colour is wide
Grid Lock
We use grids daily. Sometimes we don’t recognise them as grids, such as in a car park. Sometimes we label them with other names such as ‘cells’ when in a spreadsheet for example, or ‘apartments’ in a block of flats. Pixels in digital imagery work as a grid. Grids provide a framework for colour
A Tea Breeze
The wind came off the sea, fast and hard. Hitting the 300 foot high cliff face it shot upwards joining forces with higher level wind to bend and blast …
A Waiting Game
The gallery is unusual with at its heart the 13th century wine merchants ‘shop’, or at least the cellar he used to deal his wines from. Looked after in part by English Heritage its flint rubble walls proved to make a fine background to my work.
Cut and Run
I’ve been playing with cutting up and collaging imagery. I have been using an Albers-like square to explore colour in plants from the garden. Sometimes I have been mixing the mark with imagery directly, not in the sense of filling colour into the image but treating image and colour as separate and complementary parts of working method.
Hanging About
I rarely drive across a drawbridge. Especially one where the door have to be held back, their ancient bolt heads securing the planks barely an inch either side of the car (contains stunning flower images)
Frigid English Beauty
The French say English women are beautiful but cold, maybe because they don’t all go in for two hour lunchtime trysts (funch to American apparently) as French women are reputed to do. If true of course, then these images of frozen roses are a great representation of England.
It’s all a Performance
Art is a language and all language is about communication. It takes a transmitter and a receiver, and all art need s 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.
A Reaffirmation of Life
About exhibiting: Having work framed up to present formally to an audience can be intimidating (as well as expensive) but is an essential part of the creative process. After all unseen work is like the proverbial falling tree in the forest – if no one sees it does it happen? The purpose of art as a visual language is to communicate, and communication is not just shouting into the wind, it is about being heard.
Art is a Language
In the same way that a new play or poem re-uses language so art re-uses the visual work of others, extending knowledge through pushing ideas further. Thus Hockney continues to develop an understanding of the visual world through the use of cameras and drawing that enriches our understanding of the world around us. The language he uses is that same but his interpretation pushes it further
Constable clouds and Stella stripes
So the drawings continues to develop as I work at the same time with the photographs that combine with colour notes in the sketch book to form the base from which the ideas are developing.
The Art of Remembrance
Three of my relations died in France, and one of my partners. Grandad, I was told, suffered the after effects from a gas attack until his death in the 1960’s. OH and I have bought one of the ceramic poppies in memory primarily of her Australian antecedent.
Grappling with technique
Grappling with technique is part of finding the language appropriate to express the ideas. Oddly enough it is whilst grappling with technique that I miss the art college atmosphere, where other experience and knowledge of techniques can help bounce ideas around beneficially.
NYNY WTC remembered
In 1976 I took advantage of Laker Skytrain to fly to the USA to see the celebrations of the bicentenary of their independence. New York was the destination and for three weeks I walked the city with a camera photographing anything that caught my eye, predominantly architecture and sculpture, including the Twin Towers
Snow white?
When a student in the 60’s I had a series of lectures on colour and perception. One in particular sticks in my mind. A series of panels of white paint were placed under the light from a slide projector, in front of a black background. As each panel was added it made the previous panel look grey. The simultaneous contrast wi…
Cyprus Notes
The holiday makers lie broiling in the Mediterranean sun. Bronzed bald headed muscle men stride past mounds of bright reddening flabby granddads; slender brown bikini clad beauties strut their flat stomachs past roly-poly grandmas sunbathing topless like obscene beached whales
Mythmaking
The importance of drawing. It doesn’t pay to cut the mythmaking short, neither for the colour transitions nor for the line drawings.
Putting The Pain in Painting
The large format oil pastels drawing culminated in one exploring the colour of the California Poppy, drawing no. 5 in this metre square series. I thoroughly enjoyed making the drawing and I think they were all very successful.