Tuesday night scribbling

Some of last night's efforts.

Cloudy horizon

Another image from last night.

I have rediscovered my love of landscape photography recently. Some recent commissioned work has set me off round my local area with renewed vigour.

While this isn't the most perfect image, I love the feeling of solidity in the clouds. They look almost too heavy to be floating up there.

Nudity

A shameless attempt to see if the web-crawlers notice words like nudity, or naked, or nude, or bum..............I also really like this sketch.

a bit parky

Out earlier this-evening, malingering along the cliffs, saw these surfers working hard for their art.

Hat's off to them, the water is still cold, and the breeze was fairly hostile.

Big Game hunting

............that's sort of how I view photographing sunsets.

The whole subject of sunsets is a little over-done. So, I get a certain masochistic pleasure from not photographing every beautiful one I see.
Kind of like some big game hunter not pulling the trigger when faced with an elephant or something.
Here's one that didn't get away.

Cromer Pier, sunset, 20-6-07.

Hey it's Monday night already

Very up and down few days. Extreme weather (North Norfolk appears to have drifted south into the monsoon belt). Lots of admin tasks, then Fathers Day yesterday.

Woke up early, head filled with images and thoughts of my late father.

Instantly knew it would be best to get straight out of bed to do the whole "commune with nature" thing.

15 minutes later I was making those Robinson Crusoe footprints, alone on miles of empty sand, squinting into the white flare of early morning.

During the next hour I made a series of good images, including the one above.
The extra focus of emotional upheaval nearly always makes me work harder to get things right.
Maybe it's the cathartic process of viewing life through my own little controlled rectangle. Excluding or including at will.
Simple unequivocal aesthetics the only consideration.

I returned home to a card made by my kids, and an unnecessarily enormous bar of chocolate.
Top day.

Research

I'm wondering what makes someone buy a piece of art.

As a producer of images, both drawn/painted and photographic, it's good market research, and it's always worth making enquiries.

So is it subject, colour, size, cost ?
Maybe you wouldn't buy anyone else's work, or perhaps it's only sculpture that floats your boat.

Drop me a line and let me know.

Nuptuals

Some of you will be aware of two regular commentators here; Beachfreak and Gingerwitch.
Well, they got hitched yesterday, in a quietly beautiful, laid back, civil ceremony at a near-by stately home.

Herself and I have not enjoyed a wedding so much since our own, and we've been to a fair few.

Heartfelt thanks for asking us to be part of your celebration. There can rarely have been such a vibrant, loving, joyous hootenanny in all the two hundred plus years of the house's existence.

If, as some people believe, outpourings of human emotion leave a permanent trace in buildings and places, Wolterton Hall will echo with laughter music and dancing on the night of the 9th of June, every year forever more.

Sketches

So much of my work is dependent on drawing.

Finished paintings are a bit like sentences, impossible to create coherently without vocabulary.
Drawing is my vocabulary.

The other pleasing thing about having sketchbooks going back a while, is being able to go back through them and remember people and places.

Sometimes the smallest scribble brings to mind a model, a fellow artist, or a particular place. On occasion I'm shocked at how badly I was drawing on a particular day, or how I managed to do such a bad job of someone I know to be beautiful !

These sketches are from Tuesday's life drawing class, I particularly like the way they tell a story of the evening, sort of like a comic.

63

........years ago today, D-Day.

Please take a couple of minutes today to think about all of them.

Journeys

On days when the sky is clear, I love watching the vapour trails from aircraft criss-cross the blue.

I wonder where the people in them are going.

Holidays, business, far-away family ? Maybe they are asleep, or perhaps looking down at the ground below wondering what the people down there are doing.

Occasionally the patterns in the sky create a composition that really speaks to me, equally occasionally I have a camera with me at the time.

This is one of the good ones. It always makes me wonder where all those people in those aircraft are now.

I captured them all, completely, in a moment.........they didn't know it then, and they don't know it now.

I wonder how all their journeys ended.