Category: Design

  • Looking into the light

    I go down to the studio with my vision fractionally altered by a morning walk. Seaford’s clear air clarifies and intensifies colour, especially at sunrise. It’s part of an evolution as an artist and the challenge to keep disciplined

  • Carafe Colour

    Putting red wine in a second hand carafe raised the delight in the kitchen to a new level of pleasure

  • There be dragons…

    The idea that style might create a sense of belonging is nothing new. Throughout history, art and designs have repeatedly been used to build identity and unity. In Älesund the curatorship fo the Jugendstil Museum is is refining around the dragon motifs from Norwegian legend

  • A Conversation about Drawing

    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

  • 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

  • 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 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…

  • 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

  • Mary Watts

    Mary Watts

    Mary who? I tried to find her in my art reference books. Mary Seton Watts, wife of the Victorian establishment painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904), and he is definitely in the books.  First British artist to have a gallery devoted just to him, it is claimed. His work, including his portrait…