Like so many events, this has been scuppered by COVID. So, online it is with some artists putting little reminders of their work outside their homes. You can find all the Steyning artists here. Continue reading Steyning Arts Trail 2020
Apart from the challenge of finding someone other than yourself to draw and a landscape that isn’t the parked car outside your front window, lock down works quite well for a distance student used to the vacuum of no physical … Continue reading Busy, busy, lock down busy
Sometimes you look at something and absolutely wish you’d been the one who made it. These are quilts depicting black men, women, and children ‘whose stories were forgotten or overlooked’. Bisa Butler is essentially a portrait artist who uses fibers and quilting as a medium according to My Modern Met’s Sara Barnes (6th Feb 2020), and it’s spectacular. Perhaps the colours take me back to the vibrancy of the 60s; but if they do, these are the 60s grown up and giving a population of people, allowed at the time and for many years since, only to be niche, their … Continue reading Bisa Butler quilts
After finishing with the hot whales, I realised I’d been asked to revisit line drawings of faces from an earlier part of the Drawing1 OCA module and so I recruited some suitable internet models and bashed out a few interpretive copies in conte crayon on A1 flipchart paper. Cheap as chips. This first one took just five minutes and probably met the brief somewhat, whereas the later ones took rather longer, having not met it at all. There is at least some line visible in this one. This rather gentle old chap I managed to turn into a Burglar … Continue reading Drawings of several faces & a cat
This was the piece I’d been developing – A1, grand vision, waves and whales in ice cold blues. I liked it. I also liked the crops I’d used to help focus the energy of it and I’d put those into … Continue reading Rapidly updated final submission piece
This module has taken eighteen months, partly due to my taking too seriously tutor advice to slow down, thereby missing a deadline. It means I need to finish the next two modules in the same time. No pressure then. The Drawing unit sets out the basics of mark-making with reference to still life, landscape, the human form, and – in my case – whales. This is a detail from the larger A1 piece, made in acrylics on white cartridge selectively prepared with layers of black and white gesso for substance and texture. There are nods here to Hambling, Turner, Klee, and … Continue reading Final assignment for the Drawing module – in paint!
I have a free blog for my university course and it’s rapidly running out of space with a whole final project to go! My solution is to post some of the copied images here and link to them. Clever, huh? … Continue reading Copying for practice, posting for storage
This is a work-through of a book on drawing by Juliette Aristides. Copying is a quite a challenge for me, mostly because I’ve never done it, but also because I’m left handed and it didn’t take long to discover that … Continue reading The art of copying
‘Podcast’ review via collage. The internal geography of the Grand Parade campus has changed since I was last there (1967-68) and so, inevitably, has the premise upon which art is made. At that time we were being psychedelic, free spirited, and often quite intensively introspective but to little purpose. Politics didn’t enter into our thinking. But in this show, politics permeated everything that made its purpose clear; some of that personal, some social, and some encompassing global issues. Some gave us clues as to the raison d’etre of the work, the artist’s motivation or inspiration, their process and how it … Continue reading Review of Brighton university MA show: Fine Art, Inclusive Arts, & Digital Arts July 2019
The fourth iteration of this marvellous digital app, the wild-child of the Escapemotions stable, has just arrived. Controlling it is harder than herding cats which at least go to sleep for several hours a day and generally pitch up for food, whereas this piece of kit with its multiple brushes, myriad within-brush settings, and huge palette, has the temperament of a bucking bronco. But, after chasing round the canvas for an hour or so, I’ve made a galaxy. Eat your heart out Professor Brian! Continue reading Flamepainter4
