Tag: beach
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A Bit of a Blow
Its quieter now. We are I guess, some 400 yards from the beach, and the persistent thunder, a little like traffic noise, has gone. The sun is shining, and the weathermen and women can stop panicking until the next stiff breeze comes along. My admiration for those who persist in living in cottages at Cuckmere…
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Doorway into Dreams
In my last piece To See or Not to See I talked about photography. It was of course the driver behind much of the change in artistic perception, from Muybridge to commercial soap adverts (Bubbles), all building and subtly altering the way people see or use their eye/brain combination. This obviously impacts visual education, where…
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Trusting or Rusting?
For over eighteen months I have been working from images of my local sea defences, fascinated by the complexities of colour and texture generated by their decay. Sheet metal supposedly protecting the concrete structure that in turn protects a sewer treatment outfall, nowadays just a storm drain. We’re told. If you can believe anything a…
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Under and Overpainting
For almost a year I have worked through the paintings on paper and canvas (drawings and canvases?) producing 14 canvases and some 60+ works on paper. Immersed in the process I have changed my techniques and the way I use paint. Strangely I think the initial impulse for this may lie with a pencil drawing…
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Chocolate Teapot
The canvases of the Cuckmere metal now sit with early studies of the Splash Point metal, and alongside Bergen Harbour, something of a breakthrough piece spurred on by knowledgeable criticism – not the moronic ‘forlorn frustrated sexuality’ critique I had from the Guardian many years ago but a knowledgeable questioning from my peers who also…
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Ritual Process
The rusting is a metaphor for personal and national life, my efforts to reflect it and present its beauty reflects my own view of our country and its history. Doesn’t all art do this? If that is so, how do you judge much of what is presented as art, in all art forms, today?
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Making Waves
Right at the beginning of this series BRotS#1 had a vestigial wave pattern at its base, partly, I will admit, simply to hide the fact the drawing wasn’t quite square. See how intellectual the process can be? Ha! Throughout the remaining explorations and paintings, the sea has largely been the missing element as I have…
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Cuckmere Coastguard Cottages
Some of what I know is hearsay, some from simple observation, some from public reports. It seems that the Agency, given the job of protecting Britain’s coastline, was making choices about where to spend its limited funds (apart from on offices and administration of course). A while ago it announced it would no longer take…
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Cuckmere #BRotS
Including pieces of net and the shingle rocks that had holed and forced apart the metal plates drew me down a path to painting realistically where before, in just exploring the colour I had been able to delight in exploring paint and colour, textures, transparency and painterly concerns. Working from a photograph I took of…
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Out of the Blue
Whilst I am no longer working in the small tight confines of taped off areas characterised by the ‘Seaford Fuchsia’, I am still taping out areas to work on. The thick paint raised issues with getting a good edge as the corrugations I create in application allow ‘bleeds’ of adjacent colour. To a certain extent…
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Splash Point
I tread a line between abstraction and realism in exploring the colour. Someone described one of the resulting canvases as ‘impressionistic’, and maybe that is a fair comment, but my overriding concern is not to present reality but to show how the colours intersect and the visual richness that this ageing structure presents for our…
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Trust in Rust
BRotS – the Bridget Riley of the Shingle, an homage and an inspiration is rusting metal battered by wind and weather , but especially eroded by tons of sea water from Channel waves carrying their shingle like slingshots. Rust and erosion a constant explosion of colour
