Category: Lifestyle

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • Decay

    I have watched and recorded through my work, the corruption and decay of a once great civilisation. I go not quietly…

  • Looking Good

    It was cool and calm, not the frenetic bustle of the city, where the buildings would raise the temperature by a couple of degrees. Nature supplements the human activity beyond Splash Point, where the Kittiwake colony nests each year. A convocation of kittiwakes by the cliffs held a council meeting, another group bobbing further out…

  • Such is Living.

    spinal stenosis is part of a growing (literally) problem with bony growth appearing where the shouldn’t. It is some form of arthritis it seems, affecting spine, legs, hands etc. In fact, from what the cardiac man says it is firing off signals from my nervous system which may be false, but to which my body…

  • Bomber Boys (Grandad 2)

    Dad would sometimes meet me from school in Wroughton and we would walk to Overtown and he educated me in the wild wood and life within. He was no mean artist himself and taught me to draw, but his major achievement then was to fill me with a love of wildlife and nature.

  • Entropy

    Ritual forms a part of all forms of worship and painting forms a part of that process. The spiritual is helped by formalised processes that allow the mind and spirit to dominate the body. My rituals are part of my response to beauty. Rituals the allow me to immerse myself making art and to still…

  • Art Education (part 3)

    Art Education (part 3)

    The truth is within your soul, your spirit is to challenge and rebel, not conform. If the Foundation course gives students to tools to do this with their lives it should be part of everyone’s education, not destroyed by the academic ambition of professors or the cost cutting of Universities who close workshops to save…

  • Art Educated? (part 2)

    Art Educated? (part 2)

    The success of the art college system outside of the Universities was the cause of its fatal decline. The Universities could not compete with the creative glow the colleges gave off even at the local level, and the thriving Dip.A.D. degree system was putting to shame traditional University art courses, except for those that were…

  • Art Educated?

    Art Educated?

    19th Century educationalists saw the need for centres of innovative, creative thought to add to the inventive technical prowess of the English and buttress the manufacturing with design and innovation. So those clever Victorians created the local art colleges to be centres of revolutionary thinking in all their local manufacturing communities.

  • Silver Sheets

    The colour of the sky varied but it was its pellucid blue that enticed me to the seafront where I was fascinated by the silver sheets the surf laid down on the orange-brown of the shingle, accompanied by soft susurrations as the surf withdrew

  • Weather Watched

    Weather Watched

    The routine includes the cat of course, and can provide a moment of stillness, of prayer, in the flow of the day. In the last couple of years, I have added a limited commentary (limited by the number of characters the Beeb allows) to my observations, data fed by a local weather station and observation.…