Category: Environment
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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.
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Alas Poor Robin
I go and sit back amongst the roses, relaxing, slowing my breath and breathing deeply of their scent as my heart beat slows again. Then, rivalling the musical trill of the blackbird, I hear the lovely liquid notes of a serenading robin. It is all the thanks I need.
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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,…
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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,…
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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…
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Blast from the Past
Their generation made the opportunities for me, their votes changed the country for the better, making me the first in the family to have a University education, enabling an NHS to save my life several times over. They would be despairing of a political class that allows health and defence to crumble whilst engaging in…
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The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?
It stands erect, ringed in red and white. The dark wilderness of its base set aside from the billowing white up swelling of the chalk cliffs behind it. Thrusting upwards in public warning, its tip glazed and different to its shaft, it stands out by day attracting the attention of thousands who come to gaze…
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The Dustman and the Baroness
The studio occupies a corner at the bottom of the garden. Despite the interruptions that come from the last two years of medical interventions I am once again in a most productive painting place. I am working through many issues addressed 40 years ago, facing similar questions and finding similar answers. At this rate I…
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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…
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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
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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”.
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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…
