Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
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Ditchling’s Eric Gill Exhibition
Just over a year since my last visit to the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, I make the jaunt again, this time to see a more in-depth look at the work of Eric Gill (1882 – 1940). Much controversy surrounded this exhibition because of Gill’s sexual activities with his children, and the museum asks…
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A Hole in my Bucket
Truly it is the Landrover of garden tools and deserves a similar iconic respect as that robust farmers truck achieved .All hail the bucket. A true design icon
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Long and Winding Road
“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out It doesn’t matter much to me” (Strawberry Field Forever- the Beatles) Funny how on this long and winding road, life goes along. Just three years ago I was running a successful on-line magazine, travelling,…
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Alas Poor Robin
I go and sit back amongst the roses, relaxing, slowing my breath and breathing deeply of their scent as my heart beat slows again. Then, rivalling the musical trill of the blackbird, I hear the lovely liquid notes of a serenading robin. It is all the thanks I need.
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Trust?
At a time of elections politicians ask us to put our trust in them. They all lie about what they will do after the election in the hope of winning our vote, this being of course why the percentage of people voting goes down and down. It’s a dangerous game they play, stoking the disillusionment…
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4 Seasons
As I work through the ideas underpinning my ‘Four Season’ group of paintings, I pause to draw breath and appreciate where I am right now. If you have followed my blogs you will have seen my tale of cancer, starting in November 2012 when I revealed the diagnosis. It continued through various posts including ‘Nameless,…
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Alternate Reality
In my last piece I wrote that artists may be their own Trump, viewing the world and creating their own interpreted reality from it. I wrote how my own work had unconsciously become a simulacrum of events outside myself and the studio. I may not have been so far from mainstream thinking in writing this,…
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The Brexit Daisy
It was a tough canvas for me. So much in it that was experimental, new, and controlling and creating progressions of colour across the surface much more difficult with differing techniques than I had previous anticipated. I played with how to mix colour without changing it. So, a kind of sub-pointillist approach of marks of…
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Alt: Primary
Perhaps every artist is their own personal ‘Trump’ and they show their alternate realities in their painting, but because art is generally not seen as life threatening and often creates beauty this reality is objectively enjoyed by others. If you consume art you choose your own ‘Trump’ to follow, diving into their reality. The difference…
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Getting Started
I draw up the canvas and start to paint, but best laid plans can fail in contact with reality. I try to set parameters of colour from the start on the canvas, and that tends to set the palette. In this case I have a range of earth colours, to be contrasted against a range…
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One Bound
The daisy appears delicate, its white petals gently fringed with pink and the Archimedean spiral of the yellow centre shouting its colour against the green of the lawn. But it is robust, refusing to disappear under the attention of the lawn mower, its white spots breaking the stripy green of the mown grass. I first…
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Blast from the Past
Their generation made the opportunities for me, their votes changed the country for the better, making me the first in the family to have a University education, enabling an NHS to save my life several times over. They would be despairing of a political class that allows health and defence to crumble whilst engaging in…
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