Tag: drawing
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California Dreamin’ in colour
I had been working with the colour from the peonies I featured previously but had struggled to make anything work. This time the colour flowed off the pencils, nearly working through the page in my sketch book.
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Fools Gold?
Their colour seems short lived as petals seem to get paler over the day, and the life of a flower seems relatively short. Capturing the colour was my goal, and having filled some pages in the sketch book and taken many photographs I am ready to push forward, going with the flow, see where it…
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Pencils and Paintboxes
As a child I was brought up in Cyprus. In retrospect this profoundly influenced my sense of colour. The colours of the Mediterranean are bleached out by the sun, dominated by Naples Yellow, Terracotta and the almost Cerulean blue of the Mediterranean sky.
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Diamonds not wardrobes
I lay on the beach in the hot African autumn sunshine a century later. Further north the brutal isolation of the Skeleton Coast starts, but here on St. Helena’s Bay the sand was warm and the waves lay their spume, gently, barely feet away as the sea spends its energy. The South Atlantic here is…
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Landscape into Art
A few years ago there was an exhibition in London’s Serpentine Gallery called ‘Art into Landscape’. From the earliest Renaissance masters through Turner and the Impressionists, to Hockney’s brilliance, the face of our globe has been a source of visual fascination, interpretation and reinterpretation for painters. Our developing technologies have added an additional dimension to…
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Waves and Gate Broken – in the studio
I’m working from photographs, and wanted to go take another look at the shadows. I want to do a couple of ‘Hopperish’ images and work them into a collage prior to creating a painting using the traditional ‘squaring up’ process, and working the process into the end result – a painting about painting if you…
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Of Wood, Waves and Walking
The line of London plane trees along John Islip street at the back of the Tate gave some striking images, almost monochromatic, but relieved by gleams of the gold and eau de nil colouring of new bark. Their branches drew graphic pictures against the sky, looking like knobkerries where they had been pollarded.
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Impressionism in Winter
A camera is a poor second to drawing, but when it is as cold as it has been recently, or as wet and stormy then being like an impressionist and trying to work away outside, using pencils or pastels is coming close to martyrdom. I don’t do martyrdom, although if you listen to Barry, our…
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Capturing the Colour and Movement of the Sea
The Impressionists went to the south of France for the light. English artists found their vision at home, Constable in Suffolk, Turner in Sussex. Sussex is now my ‘home ground’ and the light is startling in its clarity, cleansed by sea breezes and enhanced by wide horizons of the Downs and the seascape
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Practicing my Scales
Musicians practice their scales hour after hour, and play practice pieces over and over again, seeking perfection. In my new studio I too am practising my scales – my colour sense is being subjected to physical testing, using different media to play games and get a sense of direction and purpose in my work. Sometimes…
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Seaford’s Shingle Shore Saves Streets
I was finishing a triptych of drawings based in the colours from the images taken on a visit to this killing ground of WW1. In Verdun birds still don’t sing. Over half a million men died there and the ground remains sacred to the French nation today. The visit was made in 2001 when digital…
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Seeing: Monet’s Garden at Giverny
Mark making also reflects the person within so aggression for example finds expression through the mark. Charcoal makes different marks to pencil, different again to thread or paint, or to those made by a carvers chisel. Monet’s work shows his grappling with rendering a reality he created in the gardens around his house in Giverny,…
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