Les fleurs de l'amour

Les fleurs de l'amour

The opening image is from my video My Fling With Flowers and the closing image is from my video Variations on a Theme. Both are on the theme but the subject is different. 

Les fleurs de l'amour

I consider the videos to be two of my best, but audience ratings differ. Maybe viewers can't cotton on to what I am portraying. Either that, or the beauty that is inherent in both alludes them. Many artists with a passion for the nude have, like myself, an attraction to the flowers of love in whichever form they take. Both subjects unashamedly reveal their charms.   

The creative potential of a child

 

My Christmas present from Enoch, my six-year-old grandson, brings me back to the theme of the creative potential of a child. Over the years I've featured my own children, my grandchildren and my friend's children. The secret is to catch them young for they soon loose the ability to see the world through the eyes of a child. As Picasso said:

It took me two years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child...What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace.

Enoch's creative signature indicates that for the time being all is well. 

But there's more to come. My brother's Christmas message warns me that one of his grandchildren has been given a box of paints for Christmas and he fears he may grow up like me!

Celebrating one-thousand posts

 
Work in progress on the sculpture You Must Believe In Spring 

This week marks my one-thousandths post from my Caribbean Island of Dominica. Over the last fifteen years these diary pages have been viewed by over half-a-million artists and art students in over 90 countries. What began with thirty hits per day, now has a daily audience of over 300.

You can add to the above score, the hundreds of posts I made thirty years ago from my studio in England. That was in the days before before blogs were invented. My brother laboriously posted my work each evening by way of a website. The opening image is from those early days.

I thank my followers from around the world for being an essential part of my work. 

A different way of seeing

Click on the image to view video

My latest video invites the viewer to join me in a feverish search in lines and paint. As with my video Variations on a Theme the images are illusive. Collectively they form a moving collage that invites you to explore the detailed contents of a painting.

The opening image is taken from the video and was last featured eight years ago in a post titled A Different Way of Seeing. What I said then remains relevant.

My paintings of the nude favour the bare minimum, both in setting and technique. I offer no distractions and I do not patronise the viewer with detailed finish. What I do offer, through my paintings and these diary pages, is an invitation to enter into the creative process. If I’m repetitive; so be it: if I bore you; hard lines. I know of no other way of finding what I’m searching for. And if per chance – usually by accident rather than intent – I succeed, there is then the difficulty of seducing you, the recipient, by way of a language that you can learn to understand.

A comment on that post shows that I'm getting the message across. It reads:

What a fantastic take on nude art! I fell in love with this at first sight.

In recent years I have extended that language by way of videos that invite the viewer to delve deeper into my paintings, and find within them, secrets that are not revealed at first glance.

Below are the fingers of the model's right hand.

I'll fling 'til my fling is all flung

A frame from my forthcoming video.

Nothing puts the back up of today's watercolourists more than my way of working in watercolour. They tell me that I am doing it all wrong: I should use a smaller brush, add less water, take my time and paint more carefully. In other words, they claim I make a mess of things. Be that as it may, I don't intend to change. In my remaining years, I'll continue flinging down watercolours until my fling is all flung.

Just as I encourage my models to twist and turn as they please - and catch them before they roll off the modelling stand - I allow my watercolours to run amok. Sometimes I catch them in the nick of time, but more often than not I allow them the freedom to add their contribution to the creative process. 

Incidentally, the No. 14 sable brush that threw down the thunderous washes, is the same brush with which I signed my name. It's been working in my favour for over fifty years.

The video I'm working on will doubtless send my critics all the more into a tither. It continues the theme of my video My Fling With Flowers, but as with my videos, The Art Of Suggestiveness and Variations On A Theme, it's the nude that I'm deflowering.

In the words of Betty Hutton Don't Preach To Me.