Tag: mythmaking

  • Getting Started

    Getting Started

    I draw up the canvas and start to paint, but best laid plans can fail in contact with reality. I try to set parameters of colour from the start on the canvas, and that tends to set the palette. In this case I have a range of earth colours, to be contrasted against a range…

  • Disintegrating Daisies

    We all belong. When chaos and disorder threaten or, even, occur, then change results. Current events show how those oppressed by rules can use the orderly rule based process of the state to change the world. The demagoguery of politicians or individuals of conviction can still change the world unpredictably. This process I mirror in…

  • 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…

  • Picking Daisies

    how the decision making with the lower daisies challenges just as much as those at the beginning. The balance of dislocation of the image colour against the line drawing, edge versus surface, constantly hovers on the brink of disintegrating into chaos – which is ,of course, largely what I want. If the viewer feels uneasy,…

  • Art Student to Artist

    “the shock of the outside world will have been a douche of cold water, as it was for me when I sobered up. Surviving this shower to establish a practice and a studio is sometimes impossible, and the shower can become a bleak torrent when competing against finding employment, marriage etc.. “

  • 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…

  • What do you paint?

    Classic question, isn’t it? Everyone’s response when you say you paint, occasionally bitten off halfway through when the questioner realises the foolishness of asking.  “I do flower paintings” is my standard riposte to this question. An answer as misleading as the question is unanswerable verbally. How to describe in succinct words my use of colour…

  • 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

  • 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…

  • Remembering the Poppy

    Remembering the Poppy

    Only when I am in the studio can I enter a state of mental isolation from my worldly problems. Total mindfulness, a state of mind many use drugs to achieve, but which painting can ‘turn on’ for me. When I’m painting or working on drawings the world ceases to exist, I even forget my health…

  • A Second Growth of Honeysuckle

    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…

  • “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