There is a type of dystopia where most the citizens are happy and believe their dystopia is an utopia. If it’s literature then the rebel gets subsumed or brainwashed, or in the sci-fi world a lone rebel fights back and brings the system crashing down. The result is presumably that the ignorant masses can now live in a miserable but newly aware state. So is the Ai revolution taking us to Big Brother? The press and pundits would love this to be true. Or do we already live in a dystopia and Ai will open our eyes to the fact? I suspect the answer is both of the above. We love opposites, they are e ..read more

When the various digital developments arrived in the past they were almost immediately put to work. We got Pixar and other wonderful entertainments. After Effects and other 2D software was there behind the scenes. So what will Ai bring us? I did a few comic style tests and worked out that with a minimal amount of hand refine you could produce the artwork of a 30 page comic in a couple of weeks. So where are they? As far as I know technology doesn’t seem to be making inroads into storyboarding though it seems perfect for the job. Despite complaining about their images being sampled the picture ..read more

So here I was for the third time in my life with a new medium on my hands. There had been the arrival of 2d computer graphics and then 3d modelling and rendering. These had caused some disruption. The first to photographers and layout artists who were either wiped out or in the case of photographers cut down from little gods to mere mortals. As always the superstars survived but the rest went back do doing mundane stuff like weddings. This new revolution was somehow different. Nobody was using it for anything. People were having fun playing with the tools but the images were glanced at for a s ..read more

When I started this blog it was to document my journey from being a commercial artist to being a painter of pictures to go in frames. I had thought the transition would be easy, after all, I had skills built up over years of illustration. I tried to set down what I knew here, to help others, but also to sort out what I knew and why in my own head. You can read the results in earlier posts and see that my journey wasn’t exactly an easy one. There was much about picture making I hadn’t learnt and a lot I had learnt which was wrong or my understanding was flawed. I stopped blogging because I’d co ..read more

Emotion. We all want it in our work it would seem. Feeling, intuition, instinct all these are toted as desirable in an artist and their work. Logic, learning, systematic thought and pragmatism are less desirable it would seem. I am puzzled by how such a strange inversion of reality has taken hold. Animals have instinct, feeling and react intuitively, but they don’t make art. It is therefore almost certain that the scorned attributes of logic, systematic thought and learning are to blame for our creative bent. I just don’t see how any other conclusion can be reached. We might I suppose choose t ..read more

Just as the Pandemic is dying away some chap in Russia, who was born a bit shorter than he would have preferred, decides world war three might be a good idea. History is just one damn thing after another. Still I am going back to writing about the important subject of art and explaining why I don’t understand it. For those who live in the South West of the UK I have open studios in the coming weeks. So I am now entirely stressed out with the preparations. I have done a few how to do’s for drawing and painting in earlier posts. I know many, when seeing my own paintings, will wonder how I have ..read more

I was near the point of congratulating myself about not having died in the pandemic so far when I woke up in the morning with only half a face. My immediate conclusion was that I might have had a stroke. The feeling is a bit like when you have been to the dentist and half your mouth is rubbery and you dribble when you eat soup. I was whisked off to Dorchester hospital to be probed. 7 hours later with the probing over they said that I probably had had a stroke, then they threw me out on the street in the dark with no coat 20 miles from home. Over the next few days I had brain scans, I passed th ..read more

Almost back to real time and I will be able to write about art again. Though since I have had all this time to research I now now that art history is all fake news. You tell me Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel I say, you prove it… were you there? Rembrandt’s self portraits were probably painted by the lady next door. I have all my paintings done for me in China, I am really a chartered accountant and not an artist at all. I am of course joking but when I was in France in a famous painting village there were artists sitting in galleries who had done just that. What is more they did bette ..read more

Here we go, three lots of vaccine now. I am very disappointed that the claims of it giving you internal 4g reception were unfounded. It now appears that most of the news, history and the bulk of human knowledge was also all completely unfounded. It was all made up by child eating lizards apparently. One certainty is that painting is really, really hard, especially when you are out trying to paint it when the wind blowing a gale. This is the track leading to the charmingly named Satan’s Square, probably where those child dining lizard people hung out in olden days. The sun burnt a hole in my r ..read more

As a person of advanced years the pandemic was particularly irritating. I don’t have all that much life left and wasting three years hiding under the rug with a mask on was not on my agenda. Still mustn’t grumble, here I am whining about it so it could be worse. So summer was here and I was time for Dorset Arts Weeks, the last one had been cancelled due to art being the risk of a super spreader event so this was a sort of a bonus one for still being alive. I was a little nervous of having probably virus ridden strangers in my home but with alcohol loaded hand washing goop and other germ warfar ..read more