Tag: Lifestyle

  • Autumn Lives

    Autumn. The heating goes on again. Sunrise is after breakfast. The first gales blow more and more leaves off the trees. Rain starts to be more frequent, harder, sometimes horizontal.  Long coats appear, the barber talks of wearing his Barbour when he walks his dog

  • The Dustman and the Baroness

    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…

  • Another day, another poppy

    Another day, another poppy

    I use acrylic, and my palettes are old plates. I have discovered that acrylic paint will stay wet on the plate for days if it is covered – except for the colour you need, mixed and used yesterday, which of course dries out and can only be mixed again with great difficulty…

  • Wrapped in the Flag?

    The neglect of the industrial heartlands by ‘captains of industry’ who I would not allow to captain a rowing boat on a park pond and by the politicians who seem only to care about their own empowerment and glory has bred a justified resentment in voters

  • Tunnel Vision

    Tunnel Vision

    Maybe too the use of dark colour, deep violet and grey through to black also reflects what I characterise as a Durer figure of death sitting on my shoulder. However, my belief in art sustains me and I have started working on the next paintings.

  • From Hull, Hell and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us!

    At a time when net migration into the UK is causing concern, the number of northern cities in decline is remarkable, and testament to the lack of judgement by those who run our economy. Population decline is inevitably linked to industrial decline, a decline that through my lifetime has characterised, and continues to characterise this…

  • Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

    The Ditchling Museum and Gallery came close to winning major design awards for the conversion, and is a pretty charming building, sensitively converted and extended to form a fine small space. Endowed by the Sackler Trust the museum will feature a steady stream of shows devoted to one of the most famous residents of the…

  • Shingle and Sand

    Dawns calm light brings gentle pinks, creating pale colourings of pastel shades, greys and pellucid blues. Later the rising sun burns these and hardens them as a potter’s kiln fires glazes, producing cobalt and dark turquoise to contrast against brilliant Naples yellows and crystalline creams.A remorseless rhythm now driven by the moon continues to crush…

  • Chicago Style

    Arguments still continue about Wright’s use of colour, and a long debate raged around his 1959 Guggenheim Gallery in New York, now painted white although the belief was that it was originally a buff colour (photo dates from 1976). Like his own home the Guggenheim was designed from the inside out.

  • Art lives Outside the Hive

    The city needs the constant injection of youth and brains sucked in from the rest of the country, and it spits out its elderly. In England we spit them out to places we mockingly call ‘God’s Waiting Rooms’

  • Cancer and Honeysuckle

    The success rate for this Cancer treatment is a staggering 80%, good news for me. It was during one of these bouts of post treatment weakness that I sat in the sun amongst the honeysuckle in the back garden, giving rise to this latest painting.

  • Exploitation vs. Conservation: Wildlife Tourism in Crisis?

    It is distressing for these communities and for the operators, that poaching is so endemic that it is now threatening the survivability of whole species (the Western Black Rhino, last seen in 2006,is now officially extinct). With death of these beasts come the death of the businesses that rely on their presence. Worse, far worse,…