Category: Lifestyle
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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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Trust?
At a time of elections politicians ask us to put our trust in them. They all lie about what they will do after the election in the hope of winning our vote, this being of course why the percentage of people voting goes down and down. It’s a dangerous game they play, stoking the disillusionment…
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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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One Bound
The daisy appears delicate, its white petals gently fringed with pink and the Archimedean spiral of the yellow centre shouting its colour against the green of the lawn. But it is robust, refusing to disappear under the attention of the lawn mower, its white spots breaking the stripy green of the mown grass. I first…
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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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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…
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How to become an Artist or Designer – a quick Guide for a young person
Many look at the glamorised television shows and think ‘I can do that’. Like being a footballer, anyone can kick the ball, but the level of skill needed to rise to the top is considerable and beyond the capabilities of many people.
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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,…
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Collecting Artist Prints
In art college, I began looking at collecting the work of other artists, starting with work by friends like Geoff Turpin. This expanded into trying to buy the work of established ’names’, underpinned by the feeling that the only way I could hang my work on the same wall as, say, Patrick Caulfield, was to…
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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.. “
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