Category: education
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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…
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Living is Easy
One of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing. Yes, you’ll spread your wings, and you’ll take to the sky. But ’til that morning, there’s nothing can harm you. Gershwin In my last piece I wrote how being away with the faeries led to the fall – not into the devil’s hands but a…
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Morning Prayers
One of the first things I do in the morning in my every day routine is as I come downstairs, I turn right while the cat sits and waits, posing. He knows what I’m doing, I’m going to turn on the computer and collect the camera from the office. I then return past the bottom…
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Henry V – lessons from history
I’ve just been reading Juliet Barkers analysis of Agincourt. Not as entertaining as Bernard Cornwell’s story (he uses her research) but far more detailed and informative of reality. Recently we have spent much time denying the relevance of history to current events, toppling statues to past greatness, all to appease urban minorities. Barker’s book illustrates…
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Westward Ho!
The only town in Britain whose name ends in an exclamation mark sits on the North Devon coast. Nearby is the beautiful little town of Bideford, perhaps one of the most beautiful places I have visited in recent years. It was here in the 19th century that the novel Westward Ho! was written by novelist…
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Whatever happened to what’s his name?
Shortly after, the politicians went mad and the establishment, perhaps jealous or threatened by the success of the nouveau companies inspired by Thatcher’s market driven approach, set about destroying her and the success she had engendered and the many nascent ambitious companies that her policies had allowed to grow energetically.
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Revolution at Grass Roots
I have written a number of pieces on this website about art education. In my now 60-year career in both art, design and ‘publishing’ I have spent time teaching in college environments. Some of this teaching has been done in FE, running successful Foundation Courses and developing vocational OND/HND programmes. For a while I worked…
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Turner Prize at the Towner
Maybe it is the kiss of death for the prize to pick one piece as being head and shoulders above the rest of the works here, especially as the prize is given for something the judges have seen that we cannot. I suppose it will not surprise many that I would pick out
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Artists Reviewed
There are now some 230+ articles on my artistic process and the life experiences that have moulded it, including of course a series of pieces on art education in which I was involved as a student and then a lecturer/course leaders/HOD for a number of years as well as an employer of arts graduates. In…
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Process
Life is complicated. Living is a process. Plan it all you want but interruptions to the process are inevitable whether from internal failure or external forces, physical, emotional, financial. Life is like that. When an artist starts on a journey of discovery through vision and technique, they are like a mongrel with a juicy bone.…
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Comical
In a previous piece I wrote about Trechikoff’s ‘Green lady’ the unlikely winner of the ‘Most Reproduced Picture of the 21st Century’. Considered by most critics as a piece of kitsch it doesn’t usually feature in lectures on 20th century art, or in learned critical programmes on television. A collector paid a million dollars for…
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Decay
I have watched and recorded through my work, the corruption and decay of a once great civilisation. I go not quietly…
