Category: drawing

  • 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…

  • Walking Backwards

    Walking Backwards

    This week or so past I have been working on primed paper to produce a series of squares as a precursor to the painting that is now on the easel. There is a great deal more drawing to come as I work on breaking down the square, but drawings need to be interspersed with canvas…

  • Teasel 2

    The ‘Teasel’ painting has come out appearing quite violent, and in my own mind I think of it as ‘War’, the disappearing grid reflecting the breakdown in the rules based international order that has seen Russia and China blatantly ignoring the rules of international behaviour to push forward their own power grabs knowing no-one wants…

  • Time Lapse

    I have been blessed that my cancer is ‘cured’, but I have another test on the 6th June, so the saga continues. Johns’ disease has not improved. We share a past, both having attended the same junior school in Wroughton, Wiltshire, and crossed paths again as students at Corsham, then Bath Academy of Art, in…

  • Out to Grass

    the guys would wave and say hello as we mowed their lawns. On one very hot day, I was welcomed with a glass of cooling orange squash. I gulped it down only belated realising it had been diluted with Polish vodka rather than water

  • Found Art

    “Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”. Marcel Duchamp 1912 It started with Duchamp’s signature on a urinal. Making a point? Or just a comment on the art around him? Was it really saying this is great art? It was a gesture that…

  • Teasing teasels

    They were used in industry to tease out threads from wool for spinning. Using photographs and drawings I am teasing out ideas about expressing their structure through colour on both canvas, and if I can figure out a simple way of doing it, in 3D too. I have been walking to regrow muscle and strength…

  • Lanzarote’s Eco-artist

    Lanzarote’s Eco-artist

    Lanzarote is considered by many César Manrique’s most important work of art. His work and influence have marked the external aspect of the island. The natives say that he has “made” Lanzarote. His desire to live with the volcanic lava led him to build his own house in the Taro de Tahiche, now open as…

  • Alternative Art Gallery

    Alternative Art Gallery

    The camera helps me in my visual playground. It is responsive and instantaneous, and so easy to dispose of unsatisfactory images. It is a strand of my art that I am weaving more and more into finished pieces.  This day was particularly visually rich.  

  • Cliff Walk 27

    Cliff Walk 27

    Yesterday the wind howled across the waves. Spume blew across the shingle and was carried through the air like partially deflated party balloons. Wind driven spray broke hard against the cliffs sending a fine mist of saltwater high into the air. Salt obscured my glasses as raindrops rattled on my hood like buckshot.

  • Rathfinny’s Riley Stripes

    Rathfinny’s Riley Stripes

     I need the mental resilience to see a reason for moving forward, into developing the ideas into various forms, Digital imagery can be quick and simple to play with but the recent Four Seasons series based on photographs of garden buckets shows that they work best when they go ‘interactive’ with pencils and other implements.

  • Found in the Fields

    This is a creative marriage of poet and painter that produces a result that embellishes the work of both Carry Akroyd and John Clare.