Tag: memories

  • Invisibility

    Invisibility

    my work is changing. I have started photographing the town itself, and for a while put a series of images on social media showing places I have been around the world and contrasting them with Seaford, a series labelled Seaford and Not Seaford. Now I’m looking at woodland and the Downs, (only the English would…

  • To The Woods

    To The Woods

    I visit the wood infrequently, but it is one of my favourite havens where I can feed my soul with its silence and beauty. Alongside the prints of my photographs of the sea defences from which so much of my painting has sprung in the last few years, sit a few of the images of…

  • Pigeons’ Luck

    Pigeons’ Luck

    I sat in the garden thinking (I do that a lot, maybe too much) and remembering the trip to the South African Delaire vineyard to see one of the most popular iconic paintings of the 1950’s and 60’s. Some say it rivals the Mona Lisa as a painting…(cough)… I remember sitting in a garden listening…

  • Blue

    Blue

    “In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art” “In order to use colour effectively it is necessary to recognise that colour deceives continually” “It should be learned that the one and the same colour evokes…

  • Morning

    Morning

    Downstairs I collect the camera and then realise I can still see the stars brightly – the Plough is low in the sky as is the sun when it is around, throwing its long shadows. I decide to delay, and instead I clean the kitchen and make an early coffee. I watch the horizon slowly…

  • The Old man of the Mountain

    The Old man of the Mountain

    . Everything is badly planned here. New housing is proposed but children’s schools are already at capacity and children will be sent over the Downs on roads that often block and isolate the town. There is not enough surgery capacity to cope and the surgeries are themselves are in buildings that need revision – so…

  • Such is Life

    Such is Life

    I only have one soul, but maybe 9 lives. As a child of two I was rushed to the RAF casualty station in Aden when another child split my lip open throwing a clockwork train at me. At six years old RAF surgeons operated to clear a twisted bowel maybe (who knows) removing part of…

  • Progress?

    Progress?

    Many of the properties we serviced were those of the wealthy who always seek to stand alone, but many were small farms, still, in 1974, using shit pails in outside loos. Some of these were even two seaters, something I had only seen before in museums. Our job was to pull the bucket out, each…

  • Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

    I don’t do cruises. That was the theory anyway. The idea that I would voluntarily confine myself with hundreds of people with no escape filled me with horror. Going on holiday with a whole village? Many years ago, as Editor of HotelDesigns, I organised some reviews of the design of cruise ships. I was taken…

  • Art and Craft

    My local church is St. Leonards. It is in the centre of the town and for many forms the central focus of small-town life, a focus enhanced by its proximity to the railway station and both our doctor’s surgeries. It has a thriving congregation especially at Christmas when it overflows with worshippers. Two years ago,…

  • Hockney, Davie and Helen Kapp at the Towner

    The show represents their early years, years that appear to be more brilliant for Davie than they were for a Hockney still seeking to come to a balance between the prevailing modes of abstraction and the new burgeoning of realism. Whilst Davie wholeheartedly embraced the working methods of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Hockney…

  • 300 Days

    My Verdun Triptych has now found a new home in a local public school, and there’s a story behind this dating back to the 1970’s. When I complete my degree course I was upset to be handed the application forms for a posts-graduate teaching course. This seemed like a vote of no-confidence by the college…