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

You can only be scared for so long. However long you look at someone you can never tell if they are a seething cauldron of viral death or just looking a bit peaky due to alcohol consumption. This lurgy is invisible though the invisible sink plunger of death just waiting to consign you to a ventilator. We could now go for walks with a friend provided you kept your distance. The rules got ever more nuanced, you could meet with six other people from 2 households in a garden provided there were no rose beds, if there were rose beds it was only 5 unless two of them were second cousins or wore red w ..read more

Just as life was settling down to a pleasant routine of painting, playing music, life drawing and regular calorific meals bolstered by alcohol this had to happen. I live alone and have a slight hermit tendency but total isolation was a bit of a shock. I have always considered myself minimally social, but once actual isolation raised its head I realised that this was not quite true. So could I paint my way through the pandemic? I could give it a go. Staying home safely away from horribly contagious fellow humans rather reduced the possibilities. Oddly I had never painted my own home despite it ..read more

I stopped this blog a few years ago as I had got well settled in Dorset and was too caught up with a new places, new people, music, painting an unfamiliar place and the general blizzard of life. I was also short of new takes on old topics and felt I was rehashing previous posts. As I age I have more difficulty being certain of my own position on any subject, which doesn’t help with creating posts. It is perhaps bad to be dogmatic, but worse to have opinions that are so vague and nebulous as to be similar to having no opinion at all. I had left London just as I was making headway with getting k ..read more

When writing this blog I occasionally revisit topics and then write something which disagrees with what I wrote before. I don’t find this remotely embarrassing as I have come to feel that any position on any subject should be up for rethinking and revising at any point. As I get older the cliche, “Set in stone” becomes less useful. I have previously commented on how the idea that the artist only paints or creates for themselves is a flawed one as any artwork presumes a second party appreciating it. I argue also that any artwork only becomes art in that moment of being viewed by another rather ..read more