Tag: Arts

  • 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…

  • Hockney, Davie and Helen Kapp at the Towner

    The show represents their early years, years that appear to be more brilliant for Davie than they were for a Hockney still seeking to come to a balance between the prevailing modes of abstraction and the new burgeoning of realism. Whilst Davie wholeheartedly embraced the working methods of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Hockney…

  • Grid Locked

    J.S. Mill said in effect freedom is the ability to challenge the rules, the grid of laws and social convention. As artists we should challenge, change, innovate not conform to other expectations. The grid of galleries, art market and critics are not the arbiters of quality but a reflection of a reality unrelated to art,…

  • 300 Days

    My Verdun Triptych has now found a new home in a local public school, and there’s a story behind this dating back to the 1970’s. When I complete my degree course I was upset to be handed the application forms for a posts-graduate teaching course. This seemed like a vote of no-confidence by the college…

  • English Heart

    English Heart

    For me as an outsider it is enough to sit and enjoy being a part of a vibrant community. Outsiders refer to Seaford as a deprived seaside town. We may not have many folk driving Bentleys (although there are one or two) and we may not boast large company headquarters, but we are still a…

  • New York in 1945

    New York in 1945

    It’s a wonderful town, we all know that. My first visit, as a young artist and college lecturer, was on Laker’s Skytrain from Manchester, £99 return for the US independence bicentennial celebrations in 1976. I took hundreds of images of skyscrapers and made my money back with a mini lecture tour of groups in Lancashire…

  • Log-In at the Towner

    There is so much complexity and sensitivity in Nash’s work. The work builds on a relationship with the land, with Ffestiniog, and is rooted deeply in the past as well as reflecting an individual delight in materials and the workings of the natural environment. Nash is claimed as a minimalist in some writing. For others…

  • Service Brat

    Where I wonder do service kids go today? I read that for example in the Royal Navy now most people own houses ‘off base’ giving their children stability but perhaps at the expense of the absence of a parent. Do service brats still suffer the dislocation of their parents postings? Is the struggle to retain…

  • Basket Case

    Scale is an important consideration in relation to the mark. I want to be able to put myself into the work and that means working with the whole body. As pieces get smaller so the ‘hinge’ around which the mark rotates changes. Small pieces use the wrist as the hinge, then it progresses to the…

  • A Bruised Bum

    Open your studio for visitors. Sound easy, doesn’t it? Ha! Sometimes there is hardly room for me to fit in between the piles of tape, open stretchers with rough cut canvas draped over them, dirty palettes, rolls of paper leaning in corners, three easels, unfinished or abandoned paintings and an overflowing plan chest. Still when…

  • Mining the Past

    “did the grid” of squares I have used for years, represent “the same mental repression I was criticising in the other artists’ work” she asked? This brought me up short. I have used the grid for many years, for many of which I was locked into a marriage that was loveless. I justified the grid…

  • Seeing (in Shoreham)

    In my search for beauty (and remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder) I treasure what I see every day. My art is based on the images of my own landscape – my garden predominantly, including recently the everyday washing line. It is not limited to this area of course and I use…