28th November 2007

Latest work
I have completed two pieces. One is in acrylic and mixed media on board, 30cms square. This painting - The sun in a seed - is about the energy of the sun captured in a seed leading to germination and subsequent growth. The other is in pastel and is called - Ice flower.

Art & Soul

Art & Soul is a new magazine, published in Peterborough for the city and its surrounds. It promotes contemporary music, visual art and writing from the area.

In issue 8, just published, it has a feature article on me and my work.

Go to - http://www.artandsoulmagazine.com/issue8/

At the top of the page click on Next Page eleven times to get to pages 21 and 22 to find the article, it takes a few seconds to get there.

Visual artists - a reductive point of view

Visual art is about looking and thinking too.

Visual artists create images, (imagine), from within the mind - the inner self, as well as from what they observe in the external environment.

Artists can - with varying success - reproduce a visual experience from observation and do the same from thinking - in the broadest sense. That is 'visualise' concepts, philosophies, cosmologies, emotions and points of view. All are rendered in point, line, form, colour and tone, in two dimensions, (eg drawings, paintings, prints, collage) or three (eg sculpture, assemblages, constructions) or four (visual experiences through time, eg video and deliberately manipulated sculptural experiences such as some forms of land art).

Artists create visual metaphors of life's experiences and speculations through varied symbolism, from absolute abstraction to those images which have a closest possible photographic or three dimensional exactitude.

Why? To articulate for us and themselves their experience of the material world and the inner world and all that that may mean for life itself.

Musings or ramblings

To muse is to engage in reverie - I think. Its a nice* thought, here I am sat in front of this PC musing and thinking about thinking - in a reverie!

*Nice, now there's a word, it can mean - fastidious, over-particular, hard to please, dainty, punctilious, scrupulous, acute, discerning, discriminating, sensitive to minute differences, requiring delicate discrimination or tact; or, more colloquially - pleasing or agreeable, satisfactory, attractive, friendly, kind......

Painting - I think a lot when painting. Applying paint to a surface with a brush is fraught with difficulties. Not least all the doubts about whether the colour is mixed 'correctly', whether there is just the right amount of paint on the hairs, whether the paint should be rubbed, scrubbed, stroked or ground in.

But that's the least of it. So many other things to think about. Painting can be a form of reverie too - a meditation. It is possible to exclude all distractions for a few brief moments while being in this state of 'niceness' brought on by the act of painting. Hours go by - sometimes - without reference to the passing of time and then - what has been achieved? Very often, not much but the value of those intensive minutes and possibly hours is considerable and can be measured or reflected in different ways. A feeling of satisfaction emerges if the image on the surface has moved on a little, constructively - that is, when the changes wrought by the brush bring the image closer to the vision in the mind's eye.

Achieving the emotional and visual links between the, incomplete, inner vision and the resulting image on the surface can be immensely satisfying and re-assuring. Though, failure to make the connection between thought and image is devastatingly depressing and de-motivating.

Sometimes, no nearly always, the 'inspiration' or the original 'idea' is so nebulous and elusive that the effort in realising it on a flat plain is excessive and wearisome, and invariably falls short. Painting is paradoxically and simultaneously a heart-breaking and heart-warming experience - but always 'nice'.

Have a look at my web site - http://www.art-insight.co.uk/