Category: painting
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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…
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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.
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Invisibility
my work is changing. I have started photographing the town itself, and for a while put a series of images on social media showing places I have been around the world and contrasting them with Seaford, a series labelled Seaford and Not Seaford. Now I’m looking at woodland and the Downs, (only the English would…
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South Barn
South Barn It has been a dry hot summer. The Barn is known for having no heating, not being wind proof, sometimes not even waterproof, and today there is one of those miserable damp misty sea fret sort of days. Perched on Seaford Head the rest of the South Downs National Park is hidden in…
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Marine Growth
It’s been a tough year. Is that what happens as one ages – each year gets tougher? Physically I have always tried to exercise, even buying a share in a central London gym once at the height of the gym investment craze. Great place to exercise. Went bust of course. I used to cycle from…
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A Renaissance
My processing also starts with traditional visual ideas, with looking, then progressing maybe from drawings, more often from digital photographs which I crop, process and alter on the computer before drawing to refine/define further, taking onto a larger scale through works on paper and then distil onto my larger scale canvases. The camera technology has…
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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…
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Green as Grass
Green is the dominant colour in the garden against which flower blossom glow, but the daisies, scattered in the long grasses hold their own in this beauty contest, the gold of the Archimedean spiral at their centres sitting among white petals that often turn to pink darkening to red at their tips. They have grown…
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Blue 2 Infinity
I started to look at definitions of ‘Blue’ in writing the previous blog on the colour. My 1954 dictionary (a thick tome I grew up using after dad bought the dictionary and the 8 volume ‘Book of Knowledge’ from a door-to-door salesman) states “Ancient colour words are very variable in meaning when distributed among the…
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Blue
“In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art” “In order to use colour effectively it is necessary to recognise that colour deceives continually” “It should be learned that the one and the same colour evokes…
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Apple Blossom Time
The super-rich may buy islands but for most some personal mobility was a blessing – but also a curse as children moved further away from parents and family support mechanisms broke down. The ‘nuclear family’ as a concept seems to be under threat. A younger generation now needs to redefine family and nationality, bearing in…
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Knock Knockin’
Mama, take this badge off of me I can’t use it anymore It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door Bob Dylan Several of us on Twitter and Facebook keep a daily visual diary of the changing months. I take mine from the same spot (approximately) in the garden…
