Category: painting
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Memory Maps
For now, I am like a Greek god maliciously deleting houses, whole roads and communities, removing data as preparation for adding new information. In a sense I am priming the canvas, making ready to create a new mythology. I am changing the meaning of the map from map into a piece of artwork.
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The Everyday
artists use what they see or find around them as a starting point. Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own…
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Processed Buddleia
It started, as most paintings do, with a walk. A regular cut down a ginnel (‘ginnel’ is Lancastrian, it’s known as a ‘twittern’ in Sussex speak, I’m told) on my walk into Seaford centre took me under a beautifully coloured buddleia. I took several photographs trying to capture the halo of complementary colour created by…
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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…
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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…
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Berardo Gallery, Lisbon
It started with a ‘bucket list’. After twenty years travelling Europe, the US and Africa there are a few places I still want to visit – and no, I don’t need anymore suggestions, thanks… In the past I have visited over 30 countries, but there are places I still want to go, experiences I still…
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Teasel 2
The ‘Teasel’ painting has come out appearing quite violent, and in my own mind I think of it as ‘War’, the disappearing grid reflecting the breakdown in the rules based international order that has seen Russia and China blatantly ignoring the rules of international behaviour to push forward their own power grabs knowing no-one wants…
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Time Lapse
I have been blessed that my cancer is ‘cured’, but I have another test on the 6th June, so the saga continues. Johns’ disease has not improved. We share a past, both having attended the same junior school in Wroughton, Wiltshire, and crossed paths again as students at Corsham, then Bath Academy of Art, in…
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Out to Grass
the guys would wave and say hello as we mowed their lawns. On one very hot day, I was welcomed with a glass of cooling orange squash. I gulped it down only belated realising it had been diluted with Polish vodka rather than water
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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…
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Teasing teasels
They were used in industry to tease out threads from wool for spinning. Using photographs and drawings I am teasing out ideas about expressing their structure through colour on both canvas, and if I can figure out a simple way of doing it, in 3D too. I have been walking to regrow muscle and strength…
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Lanzarote’s Eco-artist
Lanzarote is considered by many César Manrique’s most important work of art. His work and influence have marked the external aspect of the island. The natives say that he has “made” Lanzarote. His desire to live with the volcanic lava led him to build his own house in the Taro de Tahiche, now open as…
