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Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane

  • Ravillious Revisited at the Towner

    There has been a Ravillious room at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery for quite a long time. Reworking now in a generous and long overdue space liberated by the addition of new galleries downstairs breathes new life into appreciating his short-lived genius.

  • The Ponderwall

    It started with the weather images. Today I take them with a sophisticated digital camera but I started them in pre-digital times as small gouache paintings done very quickly and very small from my back doorstep

  • Standen – an age of innovation

    Like many a great piece of design everything here is a product of a singular design practice, Morris and Webb. Wallpapers, carpets, the totality of the fixtures and fittings is a celebration of the arts and Crafts movement so strongly espoused by Morris

  • A Garden Start

    The colour flows from the movement of hand and arm allied to brainwork developing the ideas the eye has created in the mind, The gesture with pain carries the unconscious and conscious vision

  • 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.

  • Cultured Memories at Eltham Palace

    Eltham Palace from playground for Tudor royalty to home for a 1930’s industrialist now a tourist attraction and a domestic design masterpiece

  • 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…

  • Back to the Future?

    The world shifts and we roll backwards into a new future path, so my painting must follow my heart there too. Once more into the breach…

  • Colour

    The first rose, what a moment to savour. Will incomers to this country ever feel the special joy that brings to an Englishman? Watching blooms form on the chestnut – being teased that red flowers marked the female chestnuts, white flowers the boys – and you know that it is the Spanish form with its…

  • Stepping Out

    In an earlier essay on here I wrote about ‘Following in Slaters Footsteps’ which may have been seen to imply I copy what he did. That would not be terribly creative would it? No, I follow his footsteps as he walked Seaford and the Cuckmere from where he lived, just up the road from me.…

  • A Garden

    Ten of the thirty-one days in March we had frosts, but bumblebees have been around for a couple of weeks, and I saw my first caterpillar of the year and heard the first skylark on the Down above the town

  • New Steps

    How is it that eating a plate of corned beef hash can result in a gain of 2 pounds weight? Admittedly it was a large portion, cooked myself, with a few baked beans on the side, but it blew my weight loss out the window! So now I need to set about trying to walk…