Tag: Arts
-
The Nature of Art
I continue to find beauty on my walks, the latest interest sparked by the colours of spring blossoms falling into the gutters around my small town of #Seaford. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but if artist are to regain their position in history as the visual priest/magicians of our world, then…
-

Bauhaus & Me #5 Workshops
As art and design courses are threatened by forces from either within or outside of their institution, they tend to curl inwards protectively. The advantage that Gropius and his successors had was that they ran an institution that was dedicated to the art, from architecture through to weaving. They understood and fostered lateral thinking and…
-
Bauhaus and Me #4
Death of a Dream In looking back at how the Bauhaus influenced and guided my own artistic, design and teaching practice I have come to realise that in the UK the art colleges are dying. The students are as bright and clever as ever, but the system is inimical to the spirit created by the…
-
The Bauhaus and Me #3
Albers used paints straight from the tube showing how colour against colour changed perception of each in juxtaposition. Seeing change in a stable situation suggested that change in life could be seen too when it seemed unchanging. As one critic remarks, when these painting appeared in the 1950’s it marked the end of the Bauhaus…
-
The Bauhaus and Me: Part Two – my inherited legacy
The employment of so many artists injected creativity as the Bauhaus made a major influence in modernising the world of design in parallel with the revolution in political thought taking place. Quite ironic when you consider the radical form of German socialism that was to ultimately destroy it in the same way that Stalinist thought…
-
The Bauhaus and Me
The Pre-Dip or Foundation course was not seen by them as a necessary diagnostic for young aspiring artists and designers but as a course without parallel in other disciplines and which required investment over and above that for the diplomas and degrees it serviced, forcing a constant battle of justification in an area that was…
-
Memory Maps
For now, I am like a Greek god maliciously deleting houses, whole roads and communities, removing data as preparation for adding new information. In a sense I am priming the canvas, making ready to create a new mythology. I am changing the meaning of the map from map into a piece of artwork.
-
The Everyday
artists use what they see or find around them as a starting point. Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own…
-

Golden Light
golden glow suffuses the bedroom and lights the edges of the increasingly wind stripped trees outside. Here the autumn colours show briefly as the blustering sea winds eagerly wrap their breath around the branches and whirl the dyeing leaves away across garden fences. The golden light reflects off windows down into the garden, sometimes sending…
-
Processed Buddleia
It started, as most paintings do, with a walk. A regular cut down a ginnel (‘ginnel’ is Lancastrian, it’s known as a ‘twittern’ in Sussex speak, I’m told) on my walk into Seaford centre took me under a beautifully coloured buddleia. I took several photographs trying to capture the halo of complementary colour created by…
-
Process
In previous pieces, such as the one on the Brexit Daisy, I have described the grid as a part of accidental politics. As I have been spending longer and longer submerged in the studio, surrounded by paint and pastels, smelling the aroma of both, scrabbling, scratching, brushing, scrubbing away at the layers I apply I…
-
Berardo Gallery, Lisbon
It started with a ‘bucket list’. After twenty years travelling Europe, the US and Africa there are a few places I still want to visit – and no, I don’t need anymore suggestions, thanks… In the past I have visited over 30 countries, but there are places I still want to go, experiences I still…
