A long time again.Busy with local community involvement and garden is a challenge in the wet warm summer we are having. The image above is a mod of an earlier work but much more obviously involves still graphic digital methods. The thought processes are essentially the same as when I draw or paint 'analogue' but of course the rapidity with which one can make, test, reject, accept results is astonishing. This work does begin to capture the edginess of 'being here now' for me...I'd be really interested in opinions on this.

On the domestic front I have started on a small mediterranean garden in front of the studio doors...this to be my 'wander and ponder' space when I am thinking and working.

Hibernating...mentally

Just noticed how long since I posted...guess my usual end of winter greyness overtook me for a while. Still preoccupied with an issue about static artwork and its ability to reflect the current era. A recent conversation with someone while gaming on the internet revolved around how the 'unreality of virtual reality contrasted and heightened real experience' That is it makes the importance of tangibility and real world 'transactions' more significant or renews 'novelty' is the way to explain it! So I have a feeling this forces some sort of renewal on me...its not 'painter's block' I'm feeling..its interminably long gestation of ideas...heigh ho a case for working patiently through a lot of dross I expect. Oh....I didn't really do so little for a month or so ..bathroom being decorated and garden furniture painted and studio space being steadily cleared.

Doing it anyway...

Can you understand the dilemma of creating yet not wanting to create a product line ? It's the root of the eternal complaint of the working world...wanting people who can 'do' not just think. When will schools supply us with prepared labour!
Creating is often about internal dialogue which occasionally surfaces as of some general use. Just lately I have made images that seem to be summaries of past thinking, coalescence to a milestone. This image is just such an image using computer graphics yet in many ways a very traditional composition and subject matter. It somehow encapsulates all of my past thinking with current experience and 'lives' at its best with the luminous glow of the display screen. I have always been attracted to the triptych. The oddness of a group of three needing the completion of the fourth...the viewer, is very real to me. It also offers the possibility of story telling. Are the three just part of a bigger 'comic book' of life?

Diversionary events

In common with just about everybody else in UK I have been distracted by our 'real winter'.
Opposite my home there is a dairy farm and the yard is a focus for the local bird life during hard weather as food scraps, insects and shelter in the barns are available - this picture of the 'congregation' in the usual tree sums it up. We also have a local Buzzard I am just itching to get a pic of when he occasionally sits on a nearby post.

Streaming existence

Today the BBC News site carried an item on 'Childhood'
It brought to mind several episodes of thought ...
There are issues I remember from my early years, such as the sense of exclusion and having to wait patiently to become a 'grown up'. Later a realisation that we are a social organism. Without groups of at least 2 in the first place we do not exist!
We have a human skill to understand and manage by subdividing...time into millenia right down to parsecs, lifetime down to babyhood, childhood, teenhood,adulthood.
It is easy to lose the holistic sense of self, an individual in the continuum of our lifetime, even easier to lose the sense of group identity of the species that over arches all of us. I have all my life had a conflicted set of concepts ...individual ambitions as against a sense of stewardship responsibilities, how I envy those who reconcile this early in their lives. The news report (link above) makes a good deal of the problems of overemphasis on individuality and its effect on young humans can this be a route to a new social sanity at last?