Tag: Health
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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,…
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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…
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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.…
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Aftershocks Continue
Once more I experience that feeling of dread, but not as intensely this time, just a frisson of fear. Now too I have a programme of work stretching ahead with both camera and the studio which will sustain me, distract me and give me a range of creative problems to worry about. Life is taking…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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The Dustman and the Baroness
The studio occupies a corner at the bottom of the garden. Despite the interruptions that come from the last two years of medical interventions I am once again in a most productive painting place. I am working through many issues addressed 40 years ago, facing similar questions and finding similar answers. At this rate I…
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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…
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“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
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Creative Compulsion
Keeping the creative activity moving steadily along rather than in disjointed fits and bursts has been difficult with painful and intrusive medical procedures getting in the way. Not least these have impacted mentally. Strange how physical the activity of painting is for me and how much ill health impedes the activity. I can understand something…
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Going through a Purple patch
My art is intended to reflect a view of reality, but the writing extends this through process outside the studio, sharing my visual world through
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