Tag: Landscape
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West Coast Harmonies
I never really thought of the Beach Boys as anything more than happy harmonics. West Coast surfer sound lacking the depth, emotional and musical, of the Beatles. They reflected the US West Coast in all its frothy entertainment world frivolity.
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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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Seeing Seaford as Home
Seaford ticked all the boxes. The beach, cliffs and Downs limit its spread, keeping it free of urban sprawl and giving a more predictable environment than elsewhere. I need to have an horizon, and cityscapes don’t give me that.
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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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Sea Scours Seaford’s Shingle
It was in 1987 that the groynes on Seaford beach were buried under tons of imported gravel, brought in to boost the defences along the beachfront. The reinforcing of the shingle bank, helping to keep high seas at bay from the town centre.
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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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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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Life with the Lions
African communities have to live with wildlife, not slaughter it. It is distressing to see images of stupid hunters who think it is glorious to kill the shrinking numbers of beasts in the ever decreasing wilderness area. Much better trophies are the images ‘hunted’ in a camera, demanding the same physical skills often as those…
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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 in Seaford: Myth making and Ritual
English artist Bernard Cohen talked of the balance between personal myth making and ritual. Myth making occurs through drawing and preparatory works. Here an artist indulges in activities that clarify the vision he is pursuing, that set up potentials for the ritualised realisation of the beliefs into the statements that are finished works – paintings,…
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