Category: Photography

  • A Search for Beauty

    A Search for Beauty

    Realistic or representational paintings can open a door for a viewer, and maybe why, as I have said before, that I try to walk a line between abstraction and representation. The works on paper are closer to realism that you might think, often appearing surprisingly close to the photographic image worked from, making them accessible…

  • The Weather Side

    Starting with observation, drawings result. Additional information added by keeping large print (A3+ or A2} colour photographs for colour references on the studio wall, occasionally incorporating photographic prints into the work means that much of the apparent abstractions are just more apparent than they are. Sometimes the photos are collaged to create images that can…

  • 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…

  • Cuckmere Coastguard Cottages

    Some of what I know is hearsay, some from simple observation, some from public reports. It seems that the Agency, given the job of protecting Britain’s coastline, was making choices about where to spend its limited funds (apart from on offices and administration of course). A while ago it announced it would no longer take…

  • Cuckmere #BRotS

    Including pieces of net and the shingle rocks that had holed and forced apart the metal plates drew me down a path to painting realistically where before, in just exploring the colour I had been able to delight in exploring paint and colour, textures, transparency and painterly concerns. Working from a photograph I took of…

  • Splash Point

    I tread a line between abstraction and realism in exploring the colour. Someone described one of the resulting canvases as ‘impressionistic’, and maybe that is a fair comment, but my overriding concern is not to present reality but to show how the colours intersect and the visual richness that this ageing structure presents for our…

  • Trust in Rust

    BRotS – the Bridget Riley of the Shingle, an homage and an inspiration is rusting metal battered by wind and weather , but especially eroded by tons of sea water from Channel waves carrying their shingle like slingshots. Rust and erosion a constant explosion of colour

  • Boldly Go

    The squares in the drawings hint at structure, organisation.  The colour is non-organic, contradictory, breaking down the square structure. An Homage to Albers. Reflect the outside world intruding. The square enables me to play games with visibility/colour relationships, tonality whilst maintaining a comparability between pieces. The square has/represents powers beyond the image, stability (security?). The…

  • 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…

  • Beholden Eye

    Beholden Eye

    Beauty is an individual concept formed in part by social agreement, – you buy into what the media present, and what is current fashion. Maybe you will be baffled by my enjoyment of this piece of rusting beach architecture and agree with my partner who says in slight bafflement, ‘beauty is in the eye of…

  • Watercolour

    I walk with a camera and collect images along coasts wherever I am. Occasionally they are of the quality of holiday snapshots which are collected after each trip and made into a memory book for continuing pleasure, sometimes they make stories, but often they are collected for their own sake. I look for the things…