WRECK THIS FEAR
For her birthday some months back my daughter was given a book called ‘Wreck this Journal’ by one of her school friends. She didn’t seem all that interested and I never even got a chance to look at it until, together with another friend, she stumbled across it today. It’s a book with mainly...
PETER DOIG FEVER
My first contact with Peter Doig’s painting was a picture of Pond Life (1993) in Modern Painters magazine not that long after it was created. I was strangely attracted to the wintery feel of the naïve image and its scratchy surface. The way it mimics the marks made by ice skates on the frozen...
SARGENT STEVENSON
John Singer Sargent was no revolutionary artist but his capacity for effortless representation is pretty much beyond discussion. Being a bit of a Sargent fan has been one of my best kept secrets since seeing the Tate Gallery exhibition in the 1990′s – It’s hard to imagine London before the Tate Modern now!. The thing...
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!
I’m beginning a new project inspired by The Ebb Tide, a short novel that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote together with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in his late years. Yesterday I received a bunch of books I had ordered for my research including a biography of Stevenson by Claire Harman. As you do with biographical books...
STRANGE ART FOR A STRANGE PLACE
It’s been quite a few weeks since I opened my installation in Majorca and I can now look back at it with some perspective: it’s got to be the strangest project I’ve ever done. I certainly didn’t set out to do anything weird but you don’t get to do a project for an olive oil...
MONDRIAN AT CHURCH / MONDRIAN EN MISA
More on Dutch painting. A friend that I haven’t seen for a long time had all these theories about Mondrian that he’d give me a hard time with every time I came across him at an exhibition opening. He would rant on all excited about the national character of the Dutch and how...
BRAVE NEW ART SCHOOL
I just read a post in Jonathan Jones’ art blog about the new Turps Art School in South London; a school that teaches painting in a contemporary context without charging the massive tuition fees of university art schools. By contemporary context I mean that this is no reactionary or classicist endeavour out to...
VERMEER’S HANGOVER
It’s been Dutch painting for me over the last few months and one interesting thing I noticed is the huge contrast between the work of Jan Steen, who was born in Leiden in 1626, and Jan Vermeer who was born in Delft – some ten miles from Leiden – six years later. Two...
WORKING WITH THAT ‘EL GRECO’ GUY
I’ve used golden paint before and have been wanting to use it again for some time, but the real novelty for me has been working around previous paintings. I’ve dealt with music, literature and films in my projects, but painting about other people’s paintings just never seemed right to me, like the work’s...
THE SIMPLE SEA
I was rummaging through endless files on my computer this morning, looking for some images I need and can’t find and came across an image I don’t need but haven’t looked at for years. That of a sculpture called Mar (Sea) that I made as a student, must have been 1997. I look...
QUOTE: LEV TOLSTOI
“A work of art is only real when the perceiver cannot imagine any more than that which he sees or hears or understands. when the perceiver experiences a feeling similar to reminiscence, that this, he says, already was many times, that he knew this long ago, only wasn’t able to say, but now himself has...
THAT GUY IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI!
Lots of people think country music is crap. In a way they might be right but more often than not I think they’re letting the music be overshadowed by the kind of people they think listen to it, their politics, image… A few weeks back I met up with a friend to eat...
All schools should be art schools.
