Thursday, April 18, 2024
The secret contents of my sketch bag
Monday, April 15, 2024
Exposing the Upper Extremities
We
should leave Africa out of this, we are Caribbean people, mix every which way
and that. The current national wear reflects the Caribbean, which is suited to
all who live here.
When
my granny used to walk with basket on her head she didn't dress like that.
Perhaps it's time for me to reopen the portfolio of my Bare Minimum fashion designs.
Monday, April 8, 2024
A Radical Rethink
Monday, April 1, 2024
Practicing to be a painter
Monday, March 25, 2024
Notes for Art Students, Part Two
Sunday, March 24, 2024
The ugliness of beautification
In the realms of the urban environment, “beautification” is not creating beauty, but cleaning up the mess that disfigured that which was beautiful before we made a mess of it.
Ian Nairn highlighted the problem in his book "Outrage". That was seventy years ago, and in the meantime the roots of beautification have multiplied and termites have eaten their way through my cherished copy his book.
Rural beautification is even worse. On my island the verges of a road that passes through the rain forest have been beautified with crotons.
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Focusing the eye towards telling detail.
The opening pictures illustrate what the moving image can do best; that is, zooming out from a detail to the picture as a whole. This is what the eye does when viewing a picture. But by way of the camera, I have the advantage of selecting the viewer's starting point. When left to their own devices, viewers invariably begin by convertly focusing on the body parts that are deemed forbidden.
I only wish that I could free my videos from the excessively wide horizontal format of today's screens - be it the cinema, television or handheld device. Paintings in the wide horizontal are a rarity. The format of my reclining nudes is only moderately horizontal, whereas my standing figures demand the vertical.
My most recent video is seen as source of inspiration to art students and aspiring artists who had almost given up.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Realising Creative Potential
Sunday, March 3, 2024
Sound, vision and the written word
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Injecting life into a still life
Monday, February 19, 2024
A passion that never dies.
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty...
In his book The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran has this to say about clothes:
Saturday, February 10, 2024
The quandary of depicting the nude.
My Father's Studio Edouard Danton (1848-1897)
Casting from Life
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Artist and Model
This demonstration video supplements my book Notes on the Nude. I hope it encourage a new generation of artists to pursue the challenge of working from the nude model and inspire a new generation of models. In recent times artists have resorted to working from photographs, rather than from life.
To quote from my book:
I cannot walk around a photograph of my subject, neither can I touch, feel, sense or talk to it. It can be troublesome working outdoors; you get burnt by the sun, drenched by the rain, bitten by ants and easels get bowled over in the wind. In the studio, models cannot be expected to retain the freshness of a pose for longer than a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, the rewards of working from life are worth the effort. Between the torn up false starts, the exploratory lines and the dashed down runs of colour, there on paper, is a trace of the truth!
You can view the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFBxxmBNsDU
Friday, January 26, 2024
An accolade that hopefully I will never receive
Trudy
My five minute charcoal sketch of Trudy, will never receive the accolade: It looks so real that it could almost be a photo! But many post of paintings on facebook art sites do. This I have realised after a week of scanning facebook posts. Most certainly, if it was a painting of the nude that looks so real that it could almost be a photo, social media censors would banish it forthwith.
Curiously, my brother, an accomplished photographer, occasionally does it the other way about, by photoshopping his photos to make them look like a painting.
Friday, January 19, 2024
On the cutting room floor
Friday, January 12, 2024
Only angles and babies need apply
Friday, January 5, 2024
Townscapes
The opening picture is a page from my book Townscapes. The sketch is one of thousands I've made from the pavements of towns and cities during the course of my life. It was a life that began in the darkest days of WW2. The townscapes that escaped the bombs in the 1940's were demolished by developers in the 1960's, thus my passion for recording buildings individually and collectively.