Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Capturing Impermanence. The illusion of transcient images on ephemeral surfaces........

Creating the illusion of transcient images on ephemeral surfaces involves making a collage that satisfies certain aesthetic and compositional criteria, whilst exploring the particular visual and tactile qualities of both the image and its surface simultaneously. The collage is the 'still-life' object that is carefully studied from direct observation to see how colour and light play at different times across the shallow surfaces and space on both flat and three-dimensional shapes and forms. 'Windows and 'frames' create a sense of depth, revealing and obscuring images caught in the act of being both created and destroyed. This process mimics the natural processes of growth and decay, and is a kind of active meditation on the nature of impermance, and our desire to both 'capture' and 'let go', of significant or meaningful visual phenomena that attract or repel, the 'hooks' so to speak that catch our attention, or to which we assign signifcance or meaning, and which are are beyond conventional ideas of 'beautiful' or 'ugly'. This is essentially an active contemplative process. Although obviously different, it could perhaps be compared to the practice of making a 'kasina', in that it involves making a kind of practical meditation object related to elemental visual and tactile material qualities like earth, air, fire, and water, light, colours, space, and consciousness. Recycling an old and abandoned painting, and building new layers on top, even though this primary image will not be visible later, adds to the 'archeology' of the final painting and it's ultimately hidden, or unknowable mystery for the veiwer.

I aim to make a painting that is both abstract and representational simultaneously, a trompe l'óeil that reveals its material, painted quality, and is an 'honest lie', rather than an emersive and seductive illusion to escape into.....

The images below are the early stages of the work. I will continue to add ímages to this work in progress as it evolves.

Sunday, February 1, 2026

Recycled style / reframed space.

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing"

Oscar Wilde from 'Lady Windermere's Fan

Several months ago I found a couple of discarded Moroccan divans or sofa beds on the street in Brussels. Fly-tipping is common enough in Schaerbeek, but what attracted my attention to this bit of 'rubbish' was the very intricate and beautiful hand-crafted geometric inlaid pattern made of wood veneers. I was loath to leave such fine and beautiful work in the street so rescued it to repurpose for myself as a functional and aesthetically pleasing piece of furniture. First I took just one of these, but I went back the next day to collect the second as I didn't want to waste any part of the patterned inlay, although I wasnt sure at this stage what I would use all of it for. Having removed the unnecessary parts and reconstructured the new day bed, it was apparent that I had enough to make a mirror frame. The job mostly involved some basic cutting, sanding to remove the nasty treacly varnish, reassembling and gluing the parts, some filling, and applying a softer beezwax polish. Finally I cut and inserted a piece of mirror and hung the it on the wall in the entrance to the house.

Last June I was lucky enough to be given an old composite 19th century French mirror frame in a Neo-Rococo style. It was only slightly damaged with some loose and broken plaster in parts, in particular a birds wing, and some very dark, dirty, and heavily discolored areas where gold leaf was thin or damaged. I set myself the summer task of cleaning and consolidating it; gluing, fixing and filling in the gaps and cracks, and where necessary rebuilding lost or broken elements. Once this was done I decided to regild the darker parts of the frame. I used 24 carot gold leaf and a watergilding technique on top of a clay bole matched to the colour of the frame, with some touching up in parts. I did not want to cover the old gold, but tried to match the colour and patina to the orginal. The last job is to find a piece of old mercury silvered mirror with all the signs of age to insert into the space that is so styishly framed.

Whilst both these frames belong to their particular culture and context, and are defined by the specific style and techniques of their period in time, the mirror and the space they reframe belongs always to the present moment, reflecting in the mirrored illusion, the gaze of whoever, and whatever, is placed before them, seemingly with patience and equinimity, both real and insubstantial, existing both inside and outside of time simultaneously.

The Mirror In The Front Hall

The luxurious house had a huge mirror
in the front hall, a very old mirror,
bought at least eighty years ago.

A good-looking boy, a tailor's assistant
(on Sundays an amateur athlete),
stood there with a package. He gave it to one of the household
who took it in to get the receipt.
The tailor's assistant,
left alone as he waited,
went up to the mirror, looked at himself,
and adjusted his tie. Five minutes later
they brought him the receipt. He took it and went away.

But the old mirror that had seen so much
in its long life-
thousands of objects, faces-
the old mirror was full of joy now,
proud to have embraced
total beauty for a few moments.

C. P Cavafy

Saturday, January 31, 2026

Flotsam and Jetsom. An evolving cabinet of curiosities.

I am returning to this blog after a break of about a year and a half, and reworking a series of paintings I put aside, abandandoned and forgot some years ago. They are roughly based around a process of collage and observation of still-life objects, and torn pages of old art history books. In reconfiguring objects and images dislocated from their original context I aim to explore new and unexpected juxtapositions, and find connections and meanings in what emerges mysteriously from the relationships. I might also add further layers to 'frame'' what is already there, obscuring, or even obliterating what I have done in order to create stronger more abstract compositions, using trompe l'oeil 'windows' to block and obscure what becomes superfluous. I want to evoke a feeling or sense of desire and loss, and suggest the imposibility of recapturing the past, even as one attempts to reconstruct it in the present.

Domesday Song

Jumbled in the common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie;
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.

In its cleft the torrent mocks
Prophets who in days gone by
Made a profit on each cry,
Persona grata now with none;
And a jackass language shocks
Poets who can only pun.

Silence settles on the clocks;
Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky,
Crimson in the setting sun;
In the valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a gun.

Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.

W. H Auden

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have- what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization-let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses-what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble-three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ-all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour-landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

Virginia Wolf. excerpt from  ' The Mark on the Wall.

Friday, August 2, 2024

Bones, leaves and stones ...

pencil (and bones) on paper

I have been drawing flowers and bones from direct observation, noticing changes in form happening in slow motion through time and space as they metamorphize from buds to blossoms, and inevitably wither, dry and fade. Paying attention to the simple reality of flowers in a vase is a study I have set myself over the summer as a meditation/art practice to explore analogies between the forms of human anatomy and plant morphology. I am also interested in architectural and spatial geometry which is present in the pictorial space with its vertical and horizontal axis. The particular character of the lily is evident in patterns of both growth and decay, and it's signature lines of motion, defined by curves and counter curves, which it describes at each stage in a movement which begins by reaching upwards with closed buds, opening in swaying horizontals and diagonals, and then finally sinking downwards in drooping dried cocoons as it sheds petals and leaves to the ground. At each stage the forms and shapes it adopts are worthy of close attention, as they have both individual and general qualities that are very engaging. No phase is more or less beautiful or repellant than any other. Despite this it is is rare to find images of flowers that directly focus on any stage other that the blossoming phase when the scent, form, and colour are at their most alluring and magnificent. Most people, perhaps, discard the wilted blossoms without taking time to contemplate them and so miss an essential and whole understanding of the flower and it's potential meaning, which is, as it were, 'hidden' in full view.

Pencil on paper. Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4

Bone, branch, leaf and hand

Earth, fire, air, water

All conditioned things,

Space, time, circle squared

Turning line to point,

Nowhere is now, here,

Centre, seed, and soil,

The flower in the sun,

Deathless, blossoming

Encircling emptiness.

Poem: July 2024 Hartridge, Devon/ Brussels, Belgium

Pencil and acrylic on paper. Phase1

Phase 2

Pencil and acrylic on paper

The Devil's Law Case

John Webster

[All the Flowers of the Spring]

ALL the Flowers of the Spring

Meet to perfume our burying :

These have but their growing prime,

And man does flourish but his time.

Survey our progresse from our birth,

We are set, we grow, we turne to earth.

Courts adieu, and all delights,

All bewitching appetites ;

Sweetest Breath, and clearest eye,

Like perfumes goe out and dye ;

And consequently this is done,

As shadowes wait upon the Sunne.

Vaine the ambition of Kings,

Who seeke by trophies and dead things,

To leave a living name behind,

And weave but nets to catch the wind.

Pencil on paper

Charcoal on paper

'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.'

Dylan Thomas

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-force-that-through-the-green-fuse-drives-the-flower