Tag: Photography

  • The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?

    The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?

    It stands erect, ringed in red and white. The dark wilderness of its base set aside from the billowing white up swelling of the chalk cliffs behind it. Thrusting upwards in public warning, its tip glazed and different to its shaft, it stands out by day attracting the attention of thousands who come to gaze…

  • 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,…

  • Collecting Artist Prints

    In art college, I began looking at collecting the work of other artists, starting with work by friends like Geoff Turpin. This expanded into trying to buy the work of established ’names’, underpinned by the feeling that the only way I could hang my work on the same wall as, say, Patrick Caulfield, was to…

  • 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…

  • An African Gem: Bushmans Kloof

    I have been to many places had many adventures, few compare to the delights of Bushmans Kloof. Asked to sum up my visits by a friend, I said “Simple, this is a little piece of heaven come to earth”.

  • Art Flowering

    Drawings and paintings of Poppies, geraniums, windflowers explore colour and space. Interlocked with the grid of experience they shift and move creating jewel like experience of colour illusions, paralleled by allusions to distortions and disruption social structures inflict on innocent lives.

  • 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…

  • 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…