Tag: cancer

  • Time Lapse

    I have been blessed that my cancer is ‘cured’, but I have another test on the 6th June, so the saga continues. Johns’ disease has not improved. We share a past, both having attended the same junior school in Wroughton, Wiltshire, and crossed paths again as students at Corsham, then Bath Academy of Art, in…

  • Teasing teasels

    They were used in industry to tease out threads from wool for spinning. Using photographs and drawings I am teasing out ideas about expressing their structure through colour on both canvas, and if I can figure out a simple way of doing it, in 3D too. I have been walking to regrow muscle and strength…

  • Cliff Walk 27

    Cliff Walk 27

    Yesterday the wind howled across the waves. Spume blew across the shingle and was carried through the air like partially deflated party balloons. Wind driven spray broke hard against the cliffs sending a fine mist of saltwater high into the air. Salt obscured my glasses as raindrops rattled on my hood like buckshot.

  • Rathfinny’s Riley Stripes

    Rathfinny’s Riley Stripes

     I need the mental resilience to see a reason for moving forward, into developing the ideas into various forms, Digital imagery can be quick and simple to play with but the recent Four Seasons series based on photographs of garden buckets shows that they work best when they go ‘interactive’ with pencils and other implements.

  • 4 Seasons

    As I work through the ideas underpinning my ‘Four Season’ group of paintings, I pause to draw breath and appreciate where I am right now. If you have followed my blogs you will have seen my tale of cancer, starting in November 2012 when I revealed the diagnosis. It continued through various posts including ‘Nameless,…

  • One Bound

    One Bound

    The daisy appears delicate, its white petals gently fringed with pink and the Archimedean spiral of the yellow centre shouting its colour against the green of the lawn. But it is robust, refusing to disappear under the attention of the lawn mower, its white spots breaking the stripy green of the mown grass. I first…

  • Valley of the Shadow

    Valley of the Shadow

    I went in to have my biopsies take under general anaesthetic. “Ha” said the anaesthetist, “you’re the artist aren’t you, we’ve seen you before”. I said “that’s right – I’ve had four operations recently, I get a fifth free…” Mirth all around. I’m still laughing… I am working on another in the ‘Andreas Daisies’ series.…

  • Aftershocks

    Making art is a performance, and like any performance it seeks an audience. Performing on canvas can be just a terrifying as walking on stage – rather more detached from the audience reaction, but I have experienced those newspaper reviews that disparage the artist with an incomprehension on the part of the critic about the…

  • Traumatized

    No memory, or at least only a vague memory, of coming around after the operation, which lasted well over 4 hours. “Are you alright” he asks anxiously, as I had apparently complained of chest pains in recovery. Probably due to the tight strap they had wrapped around me during the operation. He says the removal…

  • 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,…

  • 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