Tag: Art

  • What do you paint?

    Classic question, isn’t it? Everyone’s response when you say you paint, occasionally bitten off halfway through when the questioner realises the foolishness of asking.  “I do flower paintings” is my standard riposte to this question. An answer as misleading as the question is unanswerable verbally. How to describe in succinct words my use of colour…

  • Shock to the System

    Shock to the System

    Three days in, half a dozen works have been sold from the exhibition. Three days in which I have been shocked by the state of management in the hospital – observed over a weekend and showing that, certainly as far as this hospital is concerned there is an awful lot wrong with management of cleaning,…

  • Art Flowering

    Drawings and paintings of Poppies, geraniums, windflowers explore colour and space. Interlocked with the grid of experience they shift and move creating jewel like experience of colour illusions, paralleled by allusions to distortions and disruption social structures inflict on innocent lives.

  • Autumn Lives

    Autumn. The heating goes on again. Sunrise is after breakfast. The first gales blow more and more leaves off the trees. Rain starts to be more frequent, harder, sometimes horizontal.  Long coats appear, the barber talks of wearing his Barbour when he walks his dog

  • The Dustman and the Baroness

    The Dustman and the Baroness

    The studio occupies a corner at the bottom of the garden. Despite the interruptions that come from the last two years of medical interventions I am once again in a most productive painting place. I am working through many issues addressed 40 years ago, facing similar questions and finding similar answers. At this rate I…

  • Another day, another poppy

    Another day, another poppy

    I use acrylic, and my palettes are old plates. I have discovered that acrylic paint will stay wet on the plate for days if it is covered – except for the colour you need, mixed and used yesterday, which of course dries out and can only be mixed again with great difficulty…

  • Remembering the Poppy

    Remembering the Poppy

    Only when I am in the studio can I enter a state of mental isolation from my worldly problems. Total mindfulness, a state of mind many use drugs to achieve, but which painting can ‘turn on’ for me. When I’m painting or working on drawings the world ceases to exist, I even forget my health…

  • A Second Growth of Honeysuckle

    A Second Growth of Honeysuckle

    As I work towards the latest exhibition there continue to be differing strands through the work. This latest painting follows the path of the grid paintings, but my mind is now turning to large scale drawings again, as I did for the Sunlit Wave series (also to be in the Seaford October 2016 show) and…

  • “Nameless, Unreasoning, Unjustified Terror “

    I’ve survived the turmoil of the last eighteen months by focussing on my painting, despite the frustration that every time I start to become totally involved with it, I spend time in hospital again. It is inhibiting to be not fully fit as for me drawing has become a fully immersive physical experience

  • Creative Compulsion

    Keeping the creative activity moving steadily along rather than in disjointed fits and bursts has been difficult with painful and intrusive medical procedures getting in the way. Not least these have impacted mentally. Strange how physical the activity of painting is for me and how much ill health impedes the activity. I can understand something…

  • A Practised Eye

    A Practised Eye

    Photography has an immediacy that drawing and painting doesn’t. But they are not mutually exclusive but are part of the weave that makes my creative cloth. Both processes are about looking, developing a practised eye. As William Blake expressed it so well in saying ”The eye sees more than the heart knows”.

  • Tunnel Vision

    Tunnel Vision

    Maybe too the use of dark colour, deep violet and grey through to black also reflects what I characterise as a Durer figure of death sitting on my shoulder. However, my belief in art sustains me and I have started working on the next paintings.