Tag: Photography
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Seeing Seaford as Home
Seaford ticked all the boxes. The beach, cliffs and Downs limit its spread, keeping it free of urban sprawl and giving a more predictable environment than elsewhere. I need to have an horizon, and cityscapes don’t give me that.
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Waves and Gate Broken – in the studio
I’m working from photographs, and wanted to go take another look at the shadows. I want to do a couple of ‘Hopperish’ images and work them into a collage prior to creating a painting using the traditional ‘squaring up’ process, and working the process into the end result – a painting about painting if you…
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Of Wood, Waves and Walking
The line of London plane trees along John Islip street at the back of the Tate gave some striking images, almost monochromatic, but relieved by gleams of the gold and eau de nil colouring of new bark. Their branches drew graphic pictures against the sky, looking like knobkerries where they had been pollarded.
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Sea Scours Seaford’s Shingle
It was in 1987 that the groynes on Seaford beach were buried under tons of imported gravel, brought in to boost the defences along the beachfront. The reinforcing of the shingle bank, helping to keep high seas at bay from the town centre.
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Impressionism in Winter
A camera is a poor second to drawing, but when it is as cold as it has been recently, or as wet and stormy then being like an impressionist and trying to work away outside, using pencils or pastels is coming close to martyrdom. I don’t do martyrdom, although if you listen to Barry, our…
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Capturing the Colour and Movement of the Sea
The Impressionists went to the south of France for the light. English artists found their vision at home, Constable in Suffolk, Turner in Sussex. Sussex is now my ‘home ground’ and the light is startling in its clarity, cleansed by sea breezes and enhanced by wide horizons of the Downs and the seascape
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Practicing my Scales
Musicians practice their scales hour after hour, and play practice pieces over and over again, seeking perfection. In my new studio I too am practising my scales – my colour sense is being subjected to physical testing, using different media to play games and get a sense of direction and purpose in my work. Sometimes…
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Sixties London
London in 1964 was on the verge of a revolution, a social explosion that involved the whole of society, and which we are still trying to come to terms with today. In real terms the war years were behind us, and Britain was in the throes of casting off imperial pretensions.
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Life with the Lions
African communities have to live with wildlife, not slaughter it. It is distressing to see images of stupid hunters who think it is glorious to kill the shrinking numbers of beasts in the ever decreasing wilderness area. Much better trophies are the images ‘hunted’ in a camera, demanding the same physical skills often as those…
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Seaford’s Shingle Shore Saves Streets
I was finishing a triptych of drawings based in the colours from the images taken on a visit to this killing ground of WW1. In Verdun birds still don’t sing. Over half a million men died there and the ground remains sacred to the French nation today. The visit was made in 2001 when digital…
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Seeing in Seaford: Myth making and Ritual
English artist Bernard Cohen talked of the balance between personal myth making and ritual. Myth making occurs through drawing and preparatory works. Here an artist indulges in activities that clarify the vision he is pursuing, that set up potentials for the ritualised realisation of the beliefs into the statements that are finished works – paintings,…
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Seeing: Monet’s Garden at Giverny
Mark making also reflects the person within so aggression for example finds expression through the mark. Charcoal makes different marks to pencil, different again to thread or paint, or to those made by a carvers chisel. Monet’s work shows his grappling with rendering a reality he created in the gardens around his house in Giverny,…
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