Tag: mythmaking
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Memory Maps
For now, I am like a Greek god maliciously deleting houses, whole roads and communities, removing data as preparation for adding new information. In a sense I am priming the canvas, making ready to create a new mythology. I am changing the meaning of the map from map into a piece of artwork.
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Seaford Sunday
No “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” and the only stately galleons were the rain squalls sailing majestically up the Channel as I walk the shingle shore. Closer to the water the smaller stones glistened like “diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, topazes, and cinnamon,”. There wasn’t a “dirty British coaster” in sight, the closest to a “gold…
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The Everyday
artists use what they see or find around them as a starting point. Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own…
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Golden Light
golden glow suffuses the bedroom and lights the edges of the increasingly wind stripped trees outside. Here the autumn colours show briefly as the blustering sea winds eagerly wrap their breath around the branches and whirl the dyeing leaves away across garden fences. The golden light reflects off windows down into the garden, sometimes sending…
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Good Morning
I stand and watch the lights of a high-flying jet pass amongst the stars. Gradually some way behind it a contrail emerges, pink, in the growing light. As the light grows I can see the roses and sedum’s reds colouring the borders, and slowly the green returns to the dark grasses. The black silhouettes of…
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Process
In previous pieces, such as the one on the Brexit Daisy, I have described the grid as a part of accidental politics. As I have been spending longer and longer submerged in the studio, surrounded by paint and pastels, smelling the aroma of both, scrabbling, scratching, brushing, scrubbing away at the layers I apply I…
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Walking Backwards
This week or so past I have been working on primed paper to produce a series of squares as a precursor to the painting that is now on the easel. There is a great deal more drawing to come as I work on breaking down the square, but drawings need to be interspersed with canvas…
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Berardo Gallery, Lisbon
It started with a ‘bucket list’. After twenty years travelling Europe, the US and Africa there are a few places I still want to visit – and no, I don’t need anymore suggestions, thanks… In the past I have visited over 30 countries, but there are places I still want to go, experiences I still…
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Out to Grass
the guys would wave and say hello as we mowed their lawns. On one very hot day, I was welcomed with a glass of cooling orange squash. I gulped it down only belated realising it had been diluted with Polish vodka rather than water
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Found Art
“Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”. Marcel Duchamp 1912 It started with Duchamp’s signature on a urinal. Making a point? Or just a comment on the art around him? Was it really saying this is great art? It was a gesture that…
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Teasing teasels
They were used in industry to tease out threads from wool for spinning. Using photographs and drawings I am teasing out ideas about expressing their structure through colour on both canvas, and if I can figure out a simple way of doing it, in 3D too. I have been walking to regrow muscle and strength…
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Lanzarote’s Eco-artist
Lanzarote is considered by many César Manrique’s most important work of art. His work and influence have marked the external aspect of the island. The natives say that he has “made” Lanzarote. His desire to live with the volcanic lava led him to build his own house in the Taro de Tahiche, now open as…
