Tag: Visual Arts
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Putting The Pain in Painting
The large format oil pastels drawing culminated in one exploring the colour of the California Poppy, drawing no. 5 in this metre square series. I thoroughly enjoyed making the drawing and I think they were all very successful.
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He who hesitates is lost?
I have never really thought of my photographs as art in their own right, any more than I think a page from my sketchbook is. I have seen the camera as a tool and only now am I beginning to think of them as possible art forms
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To Paint is to Love Again
Henry Miller wrote ‘To Paint is to Love Again’ (Cambria Book s published by William Webb in California in 1960). It is a book title that has engraved itself on my mind, and today looking at the progress in the studio I felt the first return of the joy
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Canvas, Convolvulus and Carpets
The last major piece I did was based on an image of fuchsias but the recent drawings seem to be taking me away from this – although it may change when I start working on the canvas that is now on the easel ready. Nothing more terrifying than a large blank white canvas
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Drawing and the Garden
The garden is endlessly fascinating. Even as a student I painted images of a lawn. Now I am working on images of my own garden again. I made a little drawing of grass, which to my surprise seemed to work well, and I have been exploring the imagery further through a series of drawings.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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…
