Category: Uncategorized

  • Christina’s World

    It must be difficult for anyone born after the 60’s to imagine how important single images could be in forming imagination and memory for someone older.

  • End Game?

    I have explored techniques like collage and photography but the media themselves have contributed to the failures there. So now I must go down to the studio again, for there my future waits.

  • Winter of 1947

    World War 2 hadn’t been over for two years yet. The British were still under a regime of rationing of food, clothing and fuel. The allocated rations were lower than they had been during World War 2 as supplies were diverted from Britain to feed starving peoples on the continent of Europe.

  • An artist’s eyes – symbolism?

    Getting old is combatted in part by staying active and engaged both physically and mentally. Now women can run faster than me, the physical is represented by ambling with a camera wherever the fancy takes me. I have a target gleaned from a Chinese  exercise site where they poke fun at the standard ten thousand…

  • That’s Life

    Pleasures must be paid for, and politicians steal other people’s successes to build their own monuments. Many suffered as I did, but I also became an orphan and broke.  My marriage broke, my father died, my design practice failed. But the human spirit in an artist is steel, we bend not break, survive and continue…

  • Death of a Poppy

    I see in my garden testaments of time passing. It is an interplay between a connoisseur’s knowledge of art, a photographer’s searching vision, my aesthetic values and a sense of mortality.

  • Passwords

    now we have password systems which need password systems themselves to protect the protections that protect our passwords. To change the password I need to download another piece of software, which requires me to use my mobile phone to download a number key so that I can unlock it to get the code to unlock…

  • 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…

  • Mary Watts

    Mary Watts

    Mary who? I tried to find her in my art reference books. Mary Seton Watts, wife of the Victorian establishment painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904), and he is definitely in the books.  First British artist to have a gallery devoted just to him, it is claimed. His work, including his portrait…

  • Henry V – lessons from history

    I’ve just been reading Juliet Barkers analysis of Agincourt. Not as entertaining as Bernard Cornwell’s story (he uses her research) but far more detailed and informative of reality. Recently we have spent much time denying the relevance of history to current events, toppling statues to past greatness, all to appease urban minorities. Barker’s book illustrates…

  • Looking Ahead

    Do all artists go through creatively sterile patches? Maybe it’s a bit of creative exhaustion having made and exhibited so many paintings based in the decay of local sea defences, or maybe it is my increasing physical handicaps, but I haven’t been in the studio seriously now since before Christmas. That is about to change.…

  • Childhood in the 1950’s

    Recently my partner and I took a drive into deepest Devon, so deep we stood on a Hartland cliff looking at the Bristol Channel. My mother hailed from Devon, although that was south Devon. She was born in ‘John’s Cottage’ in Churston near Torquay, and one of my uncles was a bell ringer in the…