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Category: oil

  • Mark Making

    There was only radio for entertainment for many of my early years. I have written before of how my father taught me to draw. My formative years were spent in physical exploration  of  woods and fields, making model aeroplanes and filling books with drawings. Aged six I spent months living with my grandma and going…

  • Empires End

    “You guys have no idea how painful it is to have been young during the absolute peak era of the greatest empire in human history and now be forced to watch it all unravel. The saddest part is that we are doing it to ourselves. Absolutely agonizing experience. Like watching the most beautiful person you…

  • 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…

  • To The Woods

    To The Woods

    I visit the wood infrequently, but it is one of my favourite havens where I can feed my soul with its silence and beauty. Alongside the prints of my photographs of the sea defences from which so much of my painting has sprung in the last few years, sit a few of the images of…

  • Pigeons’ Luck

    Pigeons’ Luck

    I sat in the garden thinking (I do that a lot, maybe too much) and remembering the trip to the South African Delaire vineyard to see one of the most popular iconic paintings of the 1950’s and 60’s. Some say it rivals the Mona Lisa as a painting…(cough)… I remember sitting in a garden listening…

  • Under and Overpainting

    Under and Overpainting

    For almost a year I have worked through the paintings on paper and canvas (drawings and canvases?) producing 14 canvases and some 60+ works on paper.  Immersed in the process I have changed my techniques and the way I use paint. Strangely I think the initial impulse for this may lie with a pencil drawing…

  • BRotS Canvas

    The beginning of the process

  • Splodging

    Here you can see details of the latest paintings featured in previous blogs, showing the technique. I use brushes too, frequently underpainting with brush before working over with the scrapers and then working over again with oil pastel.  Love what I am doing ( to paint is to love again) and love the colour interrelationship…

  • Moving Forward

    Moving Forward

    Although this was the concern in the ritual of painting in the freedom of the mythmaking on paper things were going in quite a different direction. The obsession in the works on paper with the mark expressing speed and the natural swing of the arm was being modulated, and the look at pattern had also…

  • Timidity

    Colour and the gesture, two basics for every painter. I use both to try to destabilise the square visually. Colour describes spatial and emotional values and can be used to produce a surface that ‘moves’ visually, whilst colour advances and recedes so can be seen breaking through other colours, helped by tonality (follow the above…