Category: Environment
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Capturing the Colour and Movement of the Sea
The Impressionists went to the south of France for the light. English artists found their vision at home, Constable in Suffolk, Turner in Sussex. Sussex is now my ‘home ground’ and the light is startling in its clarity, cleansed by sea breezes and enhanced by wide horizons of the Downs and the seascape
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Practicing my Scales
Musicians practice their scales hour after hour, and play practice pieces over and over again, seeking perfection. In my new studio I too am practising my scales – my colour sense is being subjected to physical testing, using different media to play games and get a sense of direction and purpose in my work. Sometimes…
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Sixties London
London in 1964 was on the verge of a revolution, a social explosion that involved the whole of society, and which we are still trying to come to terms with today. In real terms the war years were behind us, and Britain was in the throes of casting off imperial pretensions.
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Life with the Lions
African communities have to live with wildlife, not slaughter it. It is distressing to see images of stupid hunters who think it is glorious to kill the shrinking numbers of beasts in the ever decreasing wilderness area. Much better trophies are the images ‘hunted’ in a camera, demanding the same physical skills often as those…
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Seaford’s Shingle Shore Saves Streets
I was finishing a triptych of drawings based in the colours from the images taken on a visit to this killing ground of WW1. In Verdun birds still don’t sing. Over half a million men died there and the ground remains sacred to the French nation today. The visit was made in 2001 when digital…
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Seeing: Monet’s Garden at Giverny
Mark making also reflects the person within so aggression for example finds expression through the mark. Charcoal makes different marks to pencil, different again to thread or paint, or to those made by a carvers chisel. Monet’s work shows his grappling with rendering a reality he created in the gardens around his house in Giverny,…
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Seeing Seaford’s Sunset on the Sea Shore
Dad taught me to see, taught me to draw. He had an artistic side that rarely found any outlet. He did a little marquetry but enjoyed teaching me how to image a ship’s bow looming up, how to image a Spitfire wing growing realistically off a fuselage.
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The Outsider – A Perpetual Watcher.
I was brought up a ‘service brat’. When your father is in the services you move every three years or so. But you are not alone in this, all the kids in the married quarters around you have dads whose postings rarely coincide with yours. So you make friends, grow together for maybe eighteen months…
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Last Light at Days End
The sun shone amber and pink onto the cliffs, their colour reflected in a sea that was calm and blue. I stopped to talk to a violinist and painter from Minnesota about mastery of instruments in both art and music,
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Seaford Seashore Shingle Shovelled
Seaford’s seashore is a single shingle bank. Not a beach it seems but actually Seaford’s sea defence system. Some say this sea defence was made necessary by the extensions to Newhaven harbour, and the wakes of the larger vessels going in to the port which scoured away the previous sandy beach. Whatever the reason as…
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Origin of the Unicorn?
The Unicorn was reputed in mythology to be cloven hoofed and horse like, both of which descriptions fit the Oryx (forgive me if I stick with the name Oryx rather than the guttural harshness of the Afrikaner Gemsbok).
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Softly Susurrating Sands in the Sossusvlei
Like the views of the Seven Sisters, the giant sand dunes in the Namibian sand sea have been snapped by hundreds of amateur and professional photographers. The fascination with landscape and the scale of our selves against it are common factors in much of todays imagery.
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