Images

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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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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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..

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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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Painting of a nude – Acrylic and Nylon Stocking

2012-09-09 at 13-24-21

This can only be described as a very simple painting. The original image was a colour photograph, which contained both the head and torso of the woman. My interest was in the reflection, and what effect the textural qualities of the stocking would add to the foreground, containing the rippling water, distorting the woman’s reflection.

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