Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
Eternal Prevarication
As nature grows and responds to the seasons so too must I. It may be for urban artists the awareness of the rhythms of life are different, determined by their social engagement with the urb. However, the superbly violent thunderstorms of the other night were a reminder of the power of nature. Cities cannot ultimately protect from these elemental forces. Life in the Hive is an artificial construct maintained by an army of underpaid workers: the bubble is fragile.
Mining the Past
“did the grid” of squares I have used for years, represent “the same mental repression I was criticising in the other artists’ work” she asked? This brought me up short. I have used the grid for many years, for many of which I was locked into a marriage that was loveless. I justified the grid in terms of it being a symbolic representation of the way politics and social rules distort and move the colour in individuals’ lives. Maybe it did indeed reflect a suppression of recognition my marriage was dead?
Seeing (in Shoreham)
In my search for beauty (and remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder) I treasure what I see every day. My art is based on the images of my own landscape – my garden predominantly, including recently the everyday washing line. It is not limited to this area of course and I use photography to extract both detail in my garden but also from walks, tours, trips to other places.
Square Peg?
All my paintings start from my enjoyment of my visual world, and the image stories I create and show on my Facebook page are as important an expression of this for me as the more formalised realisation of ideas in the studio. As to where I go from here only time and work will tell. The next peg paintings are on their way.
The Nature of Art
I continue to find beauty on my walks, the latest interest sparked by the colours of spring blossoms falling into the gutters around my small town of #Seaford. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but if artist are to regain their position in history as the visual priest/magicians of our world, then they need to give more than politically correct sloganeering or be condemned to a footnote in the dustbin of history
Bauhaus and Me #6: The Aftermath
Those who were staff and students in the Bauhaus are known as ‘Bauhäusler’. The last leader of the crew was Mies Van der Rohe, appointed in 1930. Mies remained in Germany until civil architectural work dried up as the economy shifted onto a war footing, leaving in...
Ringing Remembers One Year On
There are still ringers being recruited. There are always things to ring for. This great tradition has, as a result of the Ringing Remembers campaign, breathed new life into previously quiet towers. I look forward to the next year and the next challenges. First of which is to get my hands in the right place and not pull so hard!
Hotel Review: Kasbah Angour
Place: Kasbah Angour, Tahanaout, Nr. Marrakech, Morocco Type: 4-star Hotel Operator: Owner and Creator Paul Foulsham Web: www.Kasbahangour.com Date of Visit: March 2019 A man with a dream – no, a Yorkshireman with a dream. A geologist working for oil companies buys a...
Bauhaus & Me #5 Workshops
As art and design courses are threatened by forces from either within or outside of their institution, they tend to curl inwards protectively. The advantage that Gropius and his successors had was that they ran an institution that was dedicated to the art, from architecture through to weaving. They understood and fostered lateral thinking and its role in creativity, innovation and design. They understood the relationship between disciplines. They were free of academic oversight and bureaucracy able to innovate, setting a lesson for other learning institutions.
Bauhaus and Me #4
Death of a Dream In looking back at how the Bauhaus influenced and guided my own artistic, design and teaching practice I have come to realise that in the UK the art colleges are dying. The students are as bright and clever as ever, but the system is inimical to the...
The Bauhaus and Me #3
Albers used paints straight from the tube showing how colour against colour changed perception of each in juxtaposition. Seeing change in a stable situation suggested that change in life could be seen too when it seemed unchanging. As one critic remarks, when these painting appeared in the 1950’s it marked the end of the Bauhaus revolution. Revolution became evolution. However, the impact on late 20th century art college teaching sprang not just from his work at the Bauhaus but also his work in the US at the famous Black Mountain College after the Bauhaus was hounded out of Germany in 1933
The Bauhaus and Me: Part Two – my inherited legacy
The employment of so many artists injected creativity as the Bauhaus made a major influence in modernising the world of design in parallel with the revolution in political thought taking place. Quite ironic when you consider the radical form of German socialism that was to ultimately destroy it in the same way that Stalinist thought destroyed much of Russian artistic revolutionary activity
The Bauhaus and Me
The Pre-Dip or Foundation course was not seen by them as a necessary diagnostic for young aspiring artists and designers but as a course without parallel in other disciplines and which required investment over and above that for the diplomas and degrees it serviced, forcing a constant battle of justification in an area that was the foundation of Gropius’ model. With over 45 different design and fine art disciplines to be fed now, it is surely even more necessary today than when introduced by Itten originally in the Bauhaus, especially given how little teaching is now delivered in our Universities.
Memory Maps
For now, I am like a Greek god maliciously deleting houses, whole roads and communities, removing data as preparation for adding new information. In a sense I am priming the canvas, making ready to create a new mythology. I am changing the meaning of the map from map into a piece of artwork.
Seaford Sunday
No “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” and the only stately galleons were the rain squalls sailing majestically up the Channel as I walk the shingle shore. Closer to the water the smaller stones glistened like “diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, topazes, and cinnamon,”. There wasn’t a “dirty British coaster” in sight, the closest to a “gold moidores” is the bright yellow of the Transmanche ferry reversing its way out of Newhaven harbour.
Remembrance and the Mary Rose
Part of the beautiful displays are the cabinets containing items discovered in the cabins of individuals. Skeletons recovered so far allowed facial reconstruction to show images adding the faces of the dead to their belongings in the display cases. My partner found this disconcerting, but for me it brought the spiritual presence, the ghosts of these men from Henry 8th’s navy, into the room. Their spirits haunt this stunning museum, reminders everywhere of them in the initials, even names, carved into the recovered dishes. It is intensely moving.
Dead Ringers Remembered (3)
The campaign started a year ago with a target of 1400 new ringers. Out of the eye of national media, but noted by local press with enthusiasm, the Ringing Remembers campaign has been a stunning success both for the organiser and for the individuals like me who took...
The Everyday
artists use what they see or find around them as a starting point. Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own world, whether mental angst, romanticised observation, simple memory, or sensual moments revisited to share with and to entrance an audience.
Golden Light
golden glow suffuses the bedroom and lights the edges of the increasingly wind stripped trees outside. Here the autumn colours show briefly as the blustering sea winds eagerly wrap their breath around the branches and whirl the dyeing leaves away across garden fences. The golden light reflects off windows down into the garden, sometimes sending its beams like searchlights into the studio as if examining the work on the walls for itself.
Good Morning
I stand and watch the lights of a high-flying jet pass amongst the stars. Gradually some way behind it a contrail emerges, pink, in the growing light. As the light grows I can see the roses and sedum’s reds colouring the borders, and slowly the green returns to the dark grasses. The black silhouettes of the trees begin to show their green and orange of autumn leaves.
Obesity and diabetes
Obesity in men leads of a high percentage who cannot perform sexually anyway, who when they look down cannot see their own private parts for their stomachs, but obesity is already leading to a lower life expectancy across the UK. Earlier deaths through obesity linked diabetes are also leading to increased blindness and amputations.
Processed Buddleia
It started, as most paintings do, with a walk. A regular cut down a ginnel (‘ginnel’ is Lancastrian, it’s known as a ‘twittern’ in Sussex speak, I’m told) on my walk into Seaford centre took me under a beautifully coloured buddleia. I took several photographs trying...
Process
In previous pieces, such as the one on the Brexit Daisy, I have described the grid as a part of accidental politics. As I have been spending longer and longer submerged in the studio, surrounded by paint and pastels, smelling the aroma of both, scrabbling, scratching, brushing, scrubbing away at the layers I apply I have become more and more detached from the Urb, from the concerns of the Hive
Dead Ringers 2 – a broken bell
The Call of Bells ---------------------- For centuries the bells have called through countless ringers’ hands To come to worship, prayer and song the people of these lands The bells fell silent one by one as ringers went to war They’d heard the call to go to fight the...