Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane

 

Traumatized

No memory, or at least only a vague memory, of coming around after the operation, which lasted well over 4 hours. “Are you alright” he asks anxiously, as I had apparently complained of chest pains in recovery. Probably due to the tight strap they had wrapped around me during the operation. He says the removal of kidney and ureter had been a success but unfortunately an artery was removed “in error”.

What do you paint?

What do you paint?

Classic question, isn’t it? Everyone’s response when you say you paint, occasionally bitten off halfway through when the questioner realises the foolishness of asking.  “I do flower paintings” is my standard riposte to this question. An answer as misleading as the question is unanswerable verbally. How to describe in succinct words my use of colour and imagery when, as the editor of the London ‘Times’ Newspaper now says, one picture is worth two thousand words?

Shock to the System

Shock to the System

Three days in, half a dozen works have been sold from the exhibition. Three days in which I have been shocked by the state of management in the hospital – observed over a weekend and showing that, certainly as far as this hospital is concerned there is an awful lot wrong with management of cleaning, care and treatment.

Art Flowering

Art Flowering

Drawings and paintings of Poppies, geraniums, windflowers explore colour and space. Interlocked with the grid of experience they shift and move creating jewel like experience of colour illusions, paralleled by allusions to distortions and disruption social structures inflict on innocent lives.

Autumn Lives

Autumn Lives

Autumn. The heating goes on again. Sunrise is after breakfast. The first gales blow more and more leaves off the trees. Rain starts to be more frequent, harder, sometimes horizontal.  Long coats appear, the barber talks of wearing his Barbour when he walks his dog

The Dustman and the Baroness

The Dustman and the Baroness

The studio occupies a corner at the bottom of the garden. Despite the interruptions that come from the last two years of medical interventions I am once again in a most productive painting place. I am working through many issues addressed 40 years ago, facing similar questions and finding similar answers. At this rate I will soon pass the place I was at in my creative thinking in 1980, and then onwards to find new solution to address new problems. Painting is exciting and rewarding.

Another day, another poppy

Another day, another poppy

I use acrylic, and my palettes are old plates. I have discovered that acrylic paint will stay wet on the plate for days if it is covered – except for the colour you need, mixed and used yesterday, which of course dries out and can only be mixed again with great difficulty…

Remembering the Poppy

Remembering the Poppy

Only when I am in the studio can I enter a state of mental isolation from my worldly problems. Total mindfulness, a state of mind many use drugs to achieve, but which painting can ‘turn on’ for me. When I’m painting or working on drawings the world ceases to exist, I even forget my health issues.

A Second Growth of Honeysuckle

A Second Growth of Honeysuckle

As I work towards the latest exhibition there continue to be differing strands through the work. This latest painting follows the path of the grid paintings, but my mind is now turning to large scale drawings again, as I did for the Sunlit Wave series (also to be in the Seaford October 2016 show) and which will now be pursued through the drawings that are to come from the ‘Bridget Riley of the Shingle’ series that I will be working on later today.

“Nameless, Unreasoning, Unjustified Terror “

“Nameless, Unreasoning, Unjustified Terror “

I’ve survived the turmoil of the last eighteen months by focussing on my painting, despite the frustration that every time I start to become totally involved with it, I spend time in hospital again. It is inhibiting to be not fully fit as for me drawing has become a fully immersive physical experience

Creative Compulsion

Creative Compulsion

Keeping the creative activity moving steadily along rather than in disjointed fits and bursts has been difficult with painful and intrusive medical procedures getting in the way. Not least these have impacted mentally. Strange how physical the activity of painting is for me and how much ill health impedes the activity. I can understand something of the mental and physical frustration Vincent van Gogh must have gone through. I haven’t cut off an ear yet, but sometimes I feel like I want to…

Wrapped in the Flag?

Wrapped in the Flag?

The neglect of the industrial heartlands by ‘captains of industry’ who I would not allow to captain a rowing boat on a park pond and by the politicians who seem only to care about their own empowerment and glory has bred a justified resentment in voters

A Practised Eye

A Practised Eye

Photography has an immediacy that drawing and painting doesn’t. But they are not mutually exclusive but are part of the weave that makes my creative cloth. Both processes are about looking, developing a practised eye.

As William Blake expressed it so well in saying ”The eye sees more than the heart knows”.

Tunnel Vision

Tunnel Vision

Maybe too the use of dark colour, deep violet and grey through to black also reflects what I characterise as a Durer figure of death sitting on my shoulder. However, my belief in art sustains me and I have started working on the next paintings.

From Hull, Hell and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us!

From Hull, Hell and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us!

At a time when net migration into the UK is causing concern, the number of northern cities in decline is remarkable, and testament to the lack of judgement by those who run our economy. Population decline is inevitably linked to industrial decline, a decline that through my lifetime has characterised, and continues to characterise this once great country.

Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

The Ditchling Museum and Gallery came close to winning major design awards for the conversion, and is a pretty charming building, sensitively converted and extended to form a fine small space. Endowed by the Sackler Trust the museum will feature a steady stream of shows devoted to one of the most famous residents of the village, carver and typographer Eric Gill.

In a Mad World

In a Mad World

Sandberg died in 1984, a true creative and social hero. The show shows both the man and his work. It is small but beautifully formed and makes the trip to the de la Warr Pavilion well worthwhile

Shingle and Sand

Shingle and Sand

Dawns calm light brings gentle pinks, creating pale colourings of pastel shades, greys and pellucid blues. Later the rising sun burns these and hardens them as a potter’s kiln fires glazes, producing cobalt and dark turquoise to contrast against brilliant Naples yellows and crystalline creams.A remorseless rhythm now driven by the moon continues to crush rock and shell, flint and bone, creating more fine silver sands to wash ashore.

The Cat Sat

The Cat Sat

As students at Corsham each year we had to empty our studio spaces, scrape the floors and paint the spaces – floors grey, walls white – ready for the end of year show. Whilst I started off my studio with the grey floors and pristine white walls I think the space will have to be a lot worse than it is now before I’ll go as far as repainting

Going through a Purple patch

Going through a Purple patch

My art is intended to reflect a view of reality, but the writing extends this through process outside the studio, sharing my visual world through

The Bridget Riley of the Shingle

The Bridget Riley of the Shingle

On #Seaford seafront I find all this present, almost as a standing art joke to be enjoyed over and over on my walks. It seems to me that part of the rǒle of the artist is to represent realities that are around us as they see them, and in turn make us look differently at the realities we see.

Chicago Style

Chicago Style

Arguments still continue about Wright’s use of colour, and a long debate raged around his 1959 Guggenheim Gallery in New York, now painted white although the belief was that it was originally a buff colour (photo dates from 1976). Like his own home the Guggenheim was designed from the inside out.

Escaping the Tunnel

Escaping the Tunnel

I have agonised over whether to write this piece, but after the interest that the previous piece on cancer has generated, and the continuing interest in my 2013 piece on beating type 2 diabetes, I thought I should share my experience

Art lives Outside the Hive

Art lives Outside the Hive

The city needs the constant injection of youth and brains sucked in from the rest of the country, and it spits out its elderly. In England we spit them out to places we mockingly call ‘God’s Waiting Rooms’