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How I work

There is a randomness to the way I produce my images. The sources are usually two dimensional. Though I enjoy the discipline of drawing from life, I rarely paint from life. When I taught art I would often draw alongside the pupils, but the only paintings were produced in front of still life arrangements.

Like Francis Bacon, I rely heavily on photographs and drawings from the imagination collected in sketchbooks which I often treat as a journal. The images below are collected as sources for a painting I will be starting soon.

 

Skull picture
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The Littoral Zone

My vision quiets impatience,

as …

clouds grey their bellies,
white on ropy-smooth torsos;
skeins of weather lie across
iced-turquoise sky.

Above estuarial water,
rest halcyon hills
roosting in the mountain’s shadows.
Water, edges tucking
and then stretching
taut under these braes.
Watered silk,
palest blue,
shimmering in tension;
waiting for the weather to change
and darken the estuary.

As I wait the indeterminate heights
gather moisture, sitting saturated
on the water’s edge. These clods
of earth and stone reflect their bulk
imperfectly, stretch the water
clamped under basaltic shorelines,
as if woven on geologic looms.
Hills shrug their moss-green
shoulders up to mountains
matted with old snow,
cloaked in livid clouds,
fading to steel grey.

On the estuary’s near shore sit blocky
buildings of blond stone, gold in my sight,
thrown randomly on the shoreline
to catch the gloaming sun.

Two jetties stroke the water,
exquisitely drawn in pencil.
Graphite shaded precision,
no longer launching ships,
two lines on satin, taut.

I’m peacefully waiting for night.
I wake to dream in a sable tree
shadowing the littoral zone.

(41)

JHM March 2021

Film Poem version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5PF3XC2o08

This poem was first published in the Summer 2022 edition of Dawntreader magazine by Indigo Dreams Publishing https://www.indigodreamspublishing.com/magazines

suggest different line breaks to read:

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Gaia

My first poem published in a magazine

The Dawntreader Magazine

An arctic blast in early spring
from Gaia’s violent play. 
No moderation does she bring, 
only gale and gust and fury. 

Her breath slows its hasty harass. 
Silvern frost dusts the swards. 
Daffodils and crocus mass 
and bump their flowery heads. 

Nature sparkles in her bling, 
swift to anger. 
Then she ends her angry fling; 
 becomes serene and tender. 

She’s Greek like some chimera 
 inconsistent, often frigid. 
In Rome we called her Terra. 
Stern in civic virtue , also rigid. 

Complex though seeming inorganic 
she overwhelms the organismic 
with climate, which can destroy, 
violate her play and leave her arid. 

We call it weather and it can kill 
 Inconsistent as the woman patriarch’s defame. 
They call her home—our mother world. 
Then proceed to slow and sullen matricide. 

Printed in Dawntreader Magazine in spring 2019. Published by Indigo Dreams

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Women of pre-history

 

I have never written about my obsessive interest in prehistoric figurines carved from rock, ivory or sometimes modelled in clay. Does it need to be emphasised? Perhaps as a subject of embarrassment? The interest is obvious if you glance through the library of my visual work.

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Lucy in the Sky…

Ancestral skulls

This will be the final version of this image; the fourth screen-print based on a pencil drawing. The source of the drawings were two separate photographs in a book called From Lucy to Language. Both the print and the original drawing are included, for comparison purposes.

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Saint Brexit

As with many people who paint and draw I also write. Much of this is poetry or prose-poetry. I enjoy trying to construct the complex imagery in a poem, without having to rely heavily on narrative, plot and characterisation.

Most of my work strives for imagery and rythmic use of words, and much of it is very personal in subject matter. Some does address wider subjects, where they catch my interest. Unsurprisingly the recent referendum vote which will change our relationship with the rest of Europe at the behest of a narrow majority of petty English nationalists, peppered with a sprinkling of bigots, caught my attention. I have chosen to express my outrage in what I would describe as a prose poem, mainly because my use of metaphor consisting of the religious customs surrounding bones of venerated individuals mixed with the rituals of an even earlier era when individuals were sacrificed to guarantee their god’s favour for tribe and the expectation of a good harvest. The imagery is consistent with the metaphor. The text only has a very loose narrative and is too short to develop a plot.

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Ancestral Skulls

These latest screenprints are based on my fascination with the skulls of our remote ancestors.  The original drawings were based on photographs of fossilised skulls from our deep past. The drawings were then scanned into a computer and operated into six layers

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My Return to Screenprinting

 

I learnt screenprinting at art college. This was in the early 1970’s. It it was a graphic process secondary to the photography which I used to document the environments I was working in. The small number of screenprints I produced used some of these 35mm photographic negatives as their source.

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Ariel’s First Post – the tragedy of Sylvia Plath

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Sylvia Plath, “Ariel” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes..

IMG_1498_edited-1IMG_1537 (1)_edited-1IMG_1698_edited-1IMG_1749_edited-1

The photographs document the obvious stages in my most recent painting. The work is painted  in acrylic paint on canavas. The composition was assembled from three different sketchbook drawings. The drawings were copied lightly in pencil and then outlined in an intense violet mixed with a small amount of Prussian Blue. Two thin washes of colour were then applied over the drawing. A cool lemon yellow from the top left corner diagonally to the centre of the canvas.

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Guest post – Variety of John’s works

Recently, I have had the pleasure to view a variety of John’s artistic works.  The three examples above are in my top favourites, each for unique reasons.   The first is a portrait of a dear friend, a piece of realism. However, the warmth of the colours perfectly capture her big heart.

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