Category: drawing

  • Ditchling’s Eric Gill Exhibition

    Ditchling’s Eric Gill Exhibition

    Just over a year since my last visit to the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, I make the jaunt again, this time to see a more in-depth look at the work of Eric Gill (1882 – 1940). Much controversy surrounded this exhibition because of Gill’s sexual activities with his children, and the museum asks…

  • Long and Winding Road

    “Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out It doesn’t matter much to me” (Strawberry Field Forever- the Beatles) Funny how on this long and winding road, life goes along. Just three years ago I was running a successful on-line magazine, travelling,…

  • 4 Seasons

    As I work through the ideas underpinning my ‘Four Season’ group of paintings, I pause to draw breath and appreciate where I am right now. If you have followed my blogs you will have seen my tale of cancer, starting in November 2012 when I revealed the diagnosis. It continued through various posts including ‘Nameless,…

  • Alternate Reality

    Alternate Reality

    In my last piece I wrote that artists may be their own Trump, viewing the world and creating their own interpreted reality from it. I wrote how my own work had unconsciously become a simulacrum of events outside myself and the studio. I may not have been so far from mainstream thinking in writing this,…

  • The Brexit Daisy

    The Brexit Daisy

    It was a tough canvas for me. So much in it that was experimental, new, and controlling and creating progressions of colour across the surface much more difficult with differing techniques than I had previous anticipated. I played with how to mix colour without changing it. So, a kind of sub-pointillist approach of marks of…

  • Alt: Primary

    Perhaps every artist is their own personal ‘Trump’ and they show their alternate realities in their painting, but because art is generally not seen as life threatening and often creates beauty this reality is objectively enjoyed by others. If you consume art you choose your own ‘Trump’ to follow, diving into their reality. The difference…

  • Disintegrating Daisies

    We all belong. When chaos and disorder threaten or, even, occur, then change results. Current events show how those oppressed by rules can use the orderly rule based process of the state to change the world. The demagoguery of politicians or individuals of conviction can still change the world unpredictably. This process I mirror in…

  • Aftershocks Continue

    Once more I experience that feeling of dread, but not as intensely this time, just a frisson of fear.  Now too I have a programme of work stretching ahead with both camera and the studio which will sustain me, distract me and give me a range of creative problems to worry about. Life is taking…

  • Picking Daisies

    how the decision making with the lower daisies challenges just as much as those at the beginning. The balance of dislocation of the image colour against the line drawing, edge versus surface, constantly hovers on the brink of disintegrating into chaos – which is ,of course, largely what I want. If the viewer feels uneasy,…

  • Art Student to Artist

    “the shock of the outside world will have been a douche of cold water, as it was for me when I sobered up. Surviving this shower to establish a practice and a studio is sometimes impossible, and the shower can become a bleak torrent when competing against finding employment, marriage etc.. “

  • Aftershocks

    Making art is a performance, and like any performance it seeks an audience. Performing on canvas can be just a terrifying as walking on stage – rather more detached from the audience reaction, but I have experienced those newspaper reviews that disparage the artist with an incomprehension on the part of the critic about the…

  • 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…