Tag: seeing

  • Tate Titillation

    Tate Titillation

    The Tate has followed various foibles of various Keepers through deep green walls etc., but the latest incarnation for the first time respects the original building. The architect and interior designer have allowed it to speak, holding their egos in check with quite splendid results

  • Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, and grass is always greener

    Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, and grass is always greener

    Raindrops glistened in the grass after we had a thoroughly violent thunder and rain storm. I decided to draw outside with the oil pastel.

  • California Dreamin’ in colour

    California Dreamin’ in colour

    I had been working with the colour from the peonies I featured previously but had struggled to make anything work. This time the colour flowed off the pencils, nearly working through the page in my sketch book.

  • Fools Gold?

    Fools Gold?

    Their colour seems short lived as petals seem to get paler over the day, and the life of a flower seems relatively short. Capturing the colour was my goal, and having filled some pages in the sketch book and taken many photographs I am ready to push forward, going with the flow, see where it…

  • Pencils and Paintboxes

    Pencils and Paintboxes

    As a child I was brought up in Cyprus. In retrospect this profoundly influenced my sense of colour. The colours of the Mediterranean are bleached out by the sun, dominated by Naples Yellow, Terracotta and the almost Cerulean blue of the Mediterranean sky.

  • West Coast Harmonies

    West Coast Harmonies

    I never really thought of the Beach Boys as anything more than happy harmonics. West Coast surfer sound lacking the depth, emotional and musical, of the Beatles. They reflected the US West Coast in all its frothy entertainment world frivolity.

  • Diamonds not wardrobes

    Diamonds not wardrobes

    I lay on the beach in the hot African autumn sunshine a century later. Further north the brutal isolation of the Skeleton Coast starts, but here on St. Helena’s Bay the sand was warm and the waves lay their spume, gently, barely feet away as the sea spends its energy. The South Atlantic here is…

  • Landscape into Art

    Landscape into Art

    A few years ago there was an exhibition in London’s Serpentine Gallery called ‘Art into Landscape’. From the earliest Renaissance masters through Turner and the Impressionists, to Hockney’s brilliance, the face of our globe has been a source of visual fascination, interpretation and reinterpretation for painters. Our developing technologies have added an additional dimension to…

  • Seeing Seaford as Home

    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.

  • Impressionism in Winter

    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…

  • Capturing the Colour and Movement of the Sea

    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

  • Practicing my Scales

    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…