Themed paintings 2 Lamma Island
Themed paintings 2Lamma Island Fishing village stilt housesI have made several sketches already of this village and painted it in watercolour. My paintings usually end up messy and over-complicated, so...
View ArticleWomen Artists
Ann Eden Gibson argues in “Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics” (Yale, 1997) that the Abstract Expressionist movement became defined by and the provenance of white male heterosexual artists, and...
View ArticleMondrian by Schama
Dr GridFT December 19, 2010Amusing article by Simon Schama in FT on Piet Mondrian, a celebration of his exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.Schama’s writing is a nice mixture of cynicism and...
View ArticleThemed Paintings 3 Lamma Island
Themed Paintings 3 Lamma IslandAfter doing an abstract style painting, and liking the jaunty look that had resulted, I wanted to try out another approach- I used a bright yellow ground and emphasised...
View ArticleThemed paintings 4 Lamma Island
Inspired by Dr Grid...Started with a grid of black lines- vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved- based on a sketch done previously. I had a black and white copy of Mondrian's "Nature Morte au pot...
View ArticlePhoto Collage
Lamma JigsawToday, I finally got round to printing out the loads of pictures I took of Lamma Island, and made a photo collage, showing the fishing village from various perspectives. I started the...
View ArticleNew Year already
Back to work, and it's been over a week since I was able to sit down and look at a sketchbook. Ideas that were burning in my mind last week have cooled and new thoughts and ideas have moved in, as I...
View ArticleStill no time...
for anything but quick scribbles. My painting is like my typing- hands go too slow and can't keep up with the ideas when there are no free days. I was working on the Lamma village still, and envisaging...
View ArticlePlane thoughts 1
Have had to take time off to go to UK, due to family illness. It's a 12-hour plane journey from Hong Kong to Amsterdam....Jean-Michel Basquiat1970s-80s New YorkGrafitti artist- tagging as SAMO- “same...
View ArticlePlane thoughts 2
Sir Peter BlakeAlso watched a programme on KLM where Sir Peter Blake was interviewed about folk art. He was defending the “s” word: has no fear of sentiment as an emotion and was singing the praises of...
View ArticleSchiphol Rijksmuseum
The Schiphol Airport Rijksmuseum has an exhibition of Dutch winter paintings: from 17th to 19th centuries- depicting natural, rural scenes with human figures in the landscape. The figures are generally...
View ArticleMarch
February was lost. The Year of the Rabbit has not been cute and furry so far, more of a vermin pest. Even now, am feeling reluctant to indulge in visual imagery. Since someone very close to me has...
View ArticleRegaining perspective
The past month has been a mess, and I haven’t been working regularly, just in bursts, and feeling rather lost in the midst of experimentation, not knowing what’s good or bad, or what’s finished, or...
View ArticleFlatness
Another thread has been flatness in landscape.Looked at some work by Alfred Wallis, and at Persian and Indian art- exploring ideas of flat panels, placing landscape features at different angles, as if...
View ArticleTechniques
Resists and absorbencyHave also been revisiting resists, using glue as a resist and mixing this with newspaper collage. The clouds are made by painting over collage and then removing it, leaving the...
View ArticleSymbolism
Have been reading about Peter Lanyon, and his symbolic landscapes, which made me think of the symbolism of some of the village sketches. The flat Persian-type painting that I wanted to do, I never got...
View ArticleCloisonné
I’ve also been interested in using the idea of cloisonné. Have explored this in a couple of ways already, and looked at breaking down images into cells separated by black lines.London, FTCity...
View ArticleBarbara Rae
Yesssss!! Feeling very excited to have found a book about Barbara Rae, which, on opening, was immediately inspiring and totally awesome. Landscape, colour, travel. I feel I should have put these key...
View ArticleAnimation
Looked back at last unfinished watercolour: see how flat it is, how lifeless, and want to try to get more animated lines and shapes into it. The whole village is interdependent- there is no foundation:...
View ArticleBuddha's birthday today
.. and shoulda done way more than I have- woulda done if life and work didn't keep getting in the way."Keep the momentum going" says the brief for assignment 4, a series of 5 paintings.. Chance would...
View ArticleStained glass
Returned to Cloisonne paintings, and decided to redo the "Lamma Stained Glass"painting, but making it transparent this time, to suggest light shining through. Like the last one, I'm not trying to make...
View ArticleLamma 5
Yes, have to call a halt. I was supposed to go to Lamma Island today, but the weather forecast was thunderstorms, so stayed at home and looked through old paintings and photos. Found one I did years...
View ArticleHK Art Fair
HK International Art FairMay 2011It’s not that I don’t like art exhibitions, far from it: I have risked missing my plane to nip into the Musee d’Orsay from CDG between flights just for a quick look at...
View ArticleAssignment 4: A series of 5 paintings on a theme
A series of 5 paintings on a themeTheme: Lamma Island Fishing village on stiltsPainting 1: Village Waking1 Village WakingPainting 2: Tethered Buffalo2 Tethered BuffaloPainting 3: Lamma Patchwork3 Lamma...
View ArticleGeorge Shaw
George Shaw's painting of a council house and a flowering tree is one of the most evocative I've ever seen. I'm kind of cheered by the fact that he's been nominated for the Turner...
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