Tag: Visual Arts

  • An Edge to Reality

    In my work documenting decay on the English South Coast I walk with a camera and record what I see with a view to taking it into the studio to process into paintings. This is a developmental path well known since the 19th century, flowering in the 20th in the work of many artists

  • Stalled but engine running…

    In my last post in November, I wrote of my mental confusion and the twists and turns I was making to find a way forward with my work. Since then, I have done plenty of work with the camera, but the problems remained unresolved. I am beginning to realise that many of the problems stem…

  • Moving Forwards?

    For a couple of months, I have struggled in the studio. Drawings based on Gropius’ house in Dessau fill sketchbook pages. Images of the trees around the ‘masters houses’ of the Bauhaus, printed out, litter my worktable. My ‘bag’ is colour of course, and like most war time images the photographs I have taken in…

  • Living is Easy

    One of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing. Yes, you’ll spread your wings, and you’ll take to the sky. But ’til that morning, there’s nothing can harm you.                                                                                                                                      Gershwin In my last piece I wrote how being away with the faeries led to the fall – not into the devil’s hands but a…

  • Away with the Faeries

    Bore Da as they say in Wales. Good morning Some of us honour our roots, our predecessors and their construction of the Judeo-Christian culture in which we live. It expresses itself in many ways and yesterday I went on one of my favourite memory walks through a copse. This small strip of woodland, almost a…

  • Mark Making

    There was only radio for entertainment for many of my early years. I have written before of how my father taught me to draw. My formative years were spent in physical exploration  of  woods and fields, making model aeroplanes and filling books with drawings. Aged six I spent months living with my grandma and going…

  • Empires End

    “You guys have no idea how painful it is to have been young during the absolute peak era of the greatest empire in human history and now be forced to watch it all unravel. The saddest part is that we are doing it to ourselves. Absolutely agonizing experience. Like watching the most beautiful person you…

  • Morning Prayers

    One of the first things I do in the morning in my every day routine is as I come downstairs, I turn right while the cat sits and waits, posing. He knows what I’m doing, I’m going to turn on the computer and collect the camera from the office. I then return past the bottom…

  • In Slater’s Footsteps

    In Slater’s Footsteps

    Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.                               Dylan Thomas With the addition of a photographic record of decay, the four books of images of paintings and photographs of the sea defences at the Cuckmere…

  • A Garden Studio

    A Garden Studio

    We moved to the seaside when my partner retired as she was born in this area and waited tables in a local caff as a teenager, having happy memories of the coast. Her roots were here, whereas my RAF upbringing wedded my heart and soul to England but not to any one place. So I…

  • Emma Stibbon at the Towner.

    Emma Stibbon at the Towner.

    Now the Turner prize has gone, and we have our gallery back. Still not free of the corrosive Arts Council social work arts programme, but ignore the excrescence on the ground floor, despite its claim using the Bayeux Tapestry to justify the size of its awfulness. No, bypass it and head for the stairs leaving…

  • An English Village

    [et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]There are, apparently, 3 churches in Sussex with round flint Saxon towers. I am constantly passing two, the charming little church in the hamlet that is Southease , and, glimpsed as I drive by over the flint walls and behind conical building which I took to be an ancient…