Category: oil

  • Grid Locked

    J.S. Mill said in effect freedom is the ability to challenge the rules, the grid of laws and social convention. As artists we should challenge, change, innovate not conform to other expectations. The grid of galleries, art market and critics are not the arbiters of quality but a reflection of a reality unrelated to art,…

  • Basket Case

    Scale is an important consideration in relation to the mark. I want to be able to put myself into the work and that means working with the whole body. As pieces get smaller so the ‘hinge’ around which the mark rotates changes. Small pieces use the wrist as the hinge, then it progresses to the…

  • Art Buzz

    Much art, from the Renaissance onward, contains these hidden messages. When you buy a piece or look at a work in a gallery, look for hidden depths. Paintings are not all just decorative, but read in the light of their contemporaneous history can reveal meanings not immediately obvious – the immediately obvious usually being reserved…

  • Process

    In previous pieces, such as the one on the Brexit Daisy, I have described the grid as a part of accidental politics. As I have been spending longer and longer submerged in the studio, surrounded by paint and pastels, smelling the aroma of both, scrabbling, scratching, brushing, scrubbing away at the layers I apply I…

  • Walking Backwards

    Walking Backwards

    This week or so past I have been working on primed paper to produce a series of squares as a precursor to the painting that is now on the easel. There is a great deal more drawing to come as I work on breaking down the square, but drawings need to be interspersed with canvas…

  • Found Art

    “Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”. Marcel Duchamp 1912 It started with Duchamp’s signature on a urinal. Making a point? Or just a comment on the art around him? Was it really saying this is great art? It was a gesture that…

  • The Cat Sat

    As students at Corsham each year we had to empty our studio spaces, scrape the floors and paint the spaces – floors grey, walls white – ready for the end of year show. Whilst I started off my studio with the grey floors and pristine white walls I think the space will have to be…

  • Going through a Purple patch

    My art is intended to reflect a view of reality, but the writing extends this through process outside the studio, sharing my visual world through

  • Snap Judgements and an Innocent Eye

    The use of technology is reinforcing my interest in the nature of the mark. Much as when I screen-printed I became interested in how different meshes changed the nature of the print so I am beginning to experiment with different ways in which the printer or the printed image can be ‘abused’ to fuse with…

  • Honeysuckle Fun

    Honeysuckle Fun

    Analysing colour and form through photography and drawing . Honeysuckle the subject, mixing the digital image and the auto-graphic mark

  • Paint’n Place

    From Monet to Hockney – recognising that location is important to an artist’s oeuvre. Examples from my own art over the years reflecting Lancashire, London and Sussex

  • Bridget Riley at the De La Warr Pavilion

    Bridget Riley at the De La Warr Pavilion

    The exhibition at the de La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-0n-Sea explores Riley’s development in a linear way from the initial disturbingly disorienting black and white images through more disturbing curvilinear colour work to the calmer more lyrical recent works.