Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
“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
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?
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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’
Surfs Up
I imagined how the Coastguard buildings must be shaking under the blasts of the gales. The surf was breaking above the cliff edge at its lower points, and the sound was deafening, the force generated by spray and wind only adding to my determination to try to capture something of the violence on the camera
Sunset Colour Cliché Conundrums
Using large prints of the photographic images I collage the sunset realities with my interpretations in oil pastels. In turn the oil pastels are also photographed to give a commonality of paper, size, texture and colour quality for the collages.
A Riot of Colour
I work on paper on the wall using oil pastel, and the scale is important as it has to be large enough to contain the energy of the stroke of the arm and the intensity of the colour application. Using pastels enables me to mix colour in an almost pointillist way in the sense that the marks mix visually rather than a physical blending.
Cancer and Honeysuckle
The success rate for this Cancer treatment is a staggering 80%, good news for me. It was during one of these bouts of post treatment weakness that I sat in the sun amongst the honeysuckle in the back garden, giving rise to this latest painting.
Exploitation vs. Conservation: Wildlife Tourism in Crisis?
It is distressing for these communities and for the operators, that poaching is so endemic that it is now threatening the survivability of whole species (the Western Black Rhino, last seen in 2006,is now officially extinct). With death of these beasts come the death of the businesses that rely on their presence. Worse, far worse, is the oft voiced suspicion that the rangers who are so good at locating game by day for the tourists are making additional short term incomes by selling those locations to the poachers.
Snap Judgements and an Innocent Eye
The use of technology is reinforcing my interest in the nature of the mark. Much as when I screen-printed I became interested in how different meshes changed the nature of the print so I am beginning to experiment with different ways in which the printer or the printed image can be ‘abused’ to fuse with drawn marks.
France is failing in Laon
Grey narrow streets carry the dust of ages. Pale blue skies and sunshine throw shade echoing the dark shadows that are the past of this ancient town. Ghosts walk the streets . A town that has a past but seems to have little future
Learning the Visual Language
College experiments from the 1960’s to confirm learning about colour using light modulars and stage lighting gels, photography. Advancing and recessive colour demonstrated
Design: Towards a new English vernacular?
Defining and recognising an English vernacular style, all part of a resurgence in English national awareness as Scots want to go home. Examples from Interior design, including France and Germany