Blog 2016

Construction

Posted on December 27, 2016

With the break, I'm putting a few more images on the New work page (NB this refers to my Wordpress site). And then its time for a short break.

I've been trying some more collage, and pre-collage (where I just arrange bits and pieces and then photograph them, without resolving the issues by sticking things down).

And I'm thinking about constructivist issues, both rough analogue stuff and more hard-edged and rectilinear motifs.

New materials

Posted on November 10, 2016

I find it quite hard to analyse what I'm doing at the moment, so I won't really try. Instead, I want to keep pumping out images, which I have been doing to an extent, and then I will put them up here, where others can see them, from time to time. Even this is quite difficult for me, because I have a tendency to try and only show work that fits into some kind of pattern. This work is fairly chaotic at the moment, but that's also the joy of it for me. I don't know where its heading, but as long as its heading somewhere (which it seems to be) – that's OK.

I'm working with unfamiliar materials such as newspaper, core-flute, tissue-paper and packaging of various kinds. Its quite a change from oil paint on canvas, and is very refreshing to me. I might introduce such things as oil paint at some stage, but I'm also keen on expanding the digital reproduction into projections and video. Photography is currently a key concern, since it takes me inside of the works, changing my (and hopefully your) perspective. Some of the ambiguity that comes from these photos is exactly what keeps me interested, and wanting to do more.

There are more recent images on my New work page (see my Wordpress site).

Another page

Posted on August 17, 2016

I've added another page, called New work.

This will be somewhere I can paste images of my new work without comment. You will have to make of it what you will. A lot of this work currently is experimental and, dare I say it, casual, in that its not made particularly for consumption, rather for the sake of the process of making it, which is becoming more and more my main aim. So its a rag-tag mixture of themes and styles and materials which doesn't really make a lot of sense, yet. Maybe never will. We shall see.

New pages of pictures

Posted on June 2, 2016

I've added two new pages to this site, Tablet drawings (mainly done on an iPad I bought a little while ago), and Notebook drawings. (see my Wordpress site).

Just collecting together some of the studio work I've been doing recently, which is all moving forward steadily, while not exactly translating into larger scale paintings at the moment. Both using ink on paper, and using the screen on the tablet, seems more intuitive to me just now, so I'm going to run with this a while longer. I also want to create another new page with older drawings on it; coming soon! Links to the new pages are here and in the main menu.

Catch up

Posted on April 21, 2016

Haven't posted anything for a while now. But I've been working on drawings in ink on paper, which I am now trying to scale up to canvas (with mixed success). I'm pretty happy with the ink drawings, and will try and put some more up here to bring everything up to date.

In the meantime, I've also started mixing some of the images in GIMP. These are fairly simple mixes so far, with no further working of details. In general, this process produces more complex images, and I'm not completely sure that this is the direction I want to go in. But I love the process, and I love the surprises that it throws up, and it can be incredibly quick, so I think I will persist. It really jogs my senses.

Here, I have painted on masonite with black acrylic, managing to pull off some of the effects of ink on paper:

and here, I have started up a reasonable sized canvas in a similar fashion (but I think this requires more work):

I photographed some silver paper:

and combined this with some of the drawings (in GIMP):

Digital sketching

Posted on March 7, 2016

I bought an iPad. Strange, yes. Haven't had anything Apple for many years. But I wanted to be able to sketch on a device, and it was feeling a bit cramped on my phone. And it does have a nice screen. I think it's going to be quite interesting.

There is a surprising depth to the kind off marks you can make. Sometimes it feels like working with a hard pencil, or even etching. Sometimes it's almost like flowing ink onto paper. This business has come on so much since I first started drawing on a computer fifteen or twenty years ago.

Inevitably, I will try out quite a lot of styles before I really find my feet. Here are a few sketches to start with…

New focus

Posted on February 1, 2016

Worked on drawings in notebooks (ink). Feeling good!

Here are some:

Then I took one of these (the first one after the first whole page view), and I tried drawing it up onto one of my medium large canvases:

filled in the shapes with straight (thinned) black acrylic:

and gradually increased the black, specially at the edges (also fixed up the white area with primer):

It still doesn't look quite like the ink on paper, of course, but I can work on this any way I want. But fundamentally, I want to get away from the intense concentration on the paintwork, the surface and the finish, and focus more on the drawing – what the shapes mean, can represent or suggest. Got a lot more work to do at a basic drawing level – using the ink in my notebooks is great, but I should also do some one-off drawings (stretch up some paper) too.