William Blake after Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul, c1789-90 When looking closely at some of the images in the 'William Blake's Universe' exhibition at the Cambridge University Fitzwilliam Museum, I was entranced by the various uses of cross hatching. In particular Blake's rendering of the image chosen for the exhibition poster, had me gazing closely at its surface and as I did my gaze became lost in the movement of one surface into the next, as the cross hatching overlapped and its curved lines not only made form but produced energy at the same time.  Hendrick Goltzius  Some time a ..read more

Max Brodel: The mouth Max Brodel: The throat There still seems to be a worry about the relationship between fine art drawing and illustration. I personally find no real difference between them, both are concerned with trying to represent and communicate visually things that we experience. The fine artist often makes very personal decisions as to what is being visualised and the illustrator is usually more directed by the role they have in solving problems set by others, but whether the problem set is a personal one or set by others, at the end of the day a piece of visual communication is m ..read more

In his book 'The Entanglement' Alva Noë points out that the aesthetic experience is centred around the way that we engage with ourselves and the environments that we find ourselves immersed into. He suggests that the aim of this experience is to move from a position of not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing differently. My recent work looking at how we materialise thought through the use of significant objects forms a parallel visual conversation with his thoughts about how we come to understand things. Evaluating and detecting things, he suggests are inseparable activit ..read more

Carlfriedrich Claus's sprachblatt or speech sheets, are forms of a writing/drawing mix, whereby text is fused with texture, and as you stand away from the image, texture begins to dominate text, but as you focus in, text becomes more important. So for instance at the scale of screen reproduction texture is more immediately apparent and the image can be read as a visual sound. The use of language in visual poetry was a specialty of Carlfriedrich Claus, who developed his work in the early 1960s. He believed that the 'naturalised individual’ ought to live in harmony with a 'humanised ..read more

  Johan Creten Johan Creten: Exhibition view Johan Creten was making ceramics before clay became a fashionable material for fine artists; so he commands a certain respect for working with these materials for so long. However it is his drawings that I want to showcase for this blog, especially as I'm also someone who makes ceramics and draws. However, unlike myself, he treats the drawn element of his work as a discrete area of practice. Each drawing is a stand alone image, one that often occupies the space of drawing in a similar way to how his ceramic objects occupy architectural sp ..read more

Camp Covid , 2020 - Deanna Petherbridge Deanna Petherbridge was one of those people who you could not avoid if you were interested in drawing. I met her several times and she always carried herself with great dignity and she provided a deep pool of intellectual resources from which you could tap into and draw from many different streams of thinking about drawing. I was therefore saddened to hear that she had recently died. I first came across her large pen and ink drawings in the 1980s and was impressed by her conviction that drawing was something that could carry serious ideas. At tha ..read more

The workshop sessions involving leading were done as a block because I was going to take up quite a lot of room and the sessions needed to be fitted in around other classes. I was meant to do this the first week of January, but I was still in recovery mode after being knocked down by a car. When a time slot was next available I had the beginnings of a chest infection; however because slots are hard to come by, I decided to carry on anyway as the cold out of which the infection grew was hopefully well past its contagious phase. This was probably not a good idea, as I found it hard to conce ..read more

I have for a while now been looking at interoception and the importance of 'feeling' or emotional experiences. However as I look into the Citrasutras, which are important writings on Indian aesthetics, I realise that once again, western aesthetic theory is way behind the times and that emotional value has been central to the way that painting has been thought about for hundreds of years on the Indian sub-continent. Shri S Rajam The six limbs (shad-anga) of traditional Indian painting , as given in the Chitrasütra are the following: Sädrusya (similarity); Pramäna (proportion); Rüpabhedä (diff ..read more

  The lamed vavniks or lamed vodniks are 36 people, who unknown to each other are saving the world. The legend of the lamed-vavniks has Talmudic origins. Lamedvavnik; a Yiddish term, is derived from the Hebrew word for thirty: 'lamed' and the Hebrew word for six: 'vav'. They combine to make thirty-six, the number of righteous individuals without whom the world would not exist.  In this time of terrible atrocities I decided that we needed to be reminded of the possibility of ordinary people doing good. Therefore I am presenting thirty-six portraits of ordinary peo ..read more

I'm back worrying about what my work is useful for? Is art ever of any use? This is something I have had to wrestle with for well over 50 years now, and I think it's time to set out once again what types of answer have kept me going. I've also just been reemployed by the institution I have worked with for the last 48 years, as a research fellow. This will mean trying to show how my work as an artist is useful and that it has some sort of impact on society. Therefore the clearer I am about what is going on the better. I am very aware that many of the people that look at this blog are fine art s ..read more