I made this collage of the wonderful Glastonbury Thorn yesterday. The famous tree is a form of common Hawthorne growing around the Glastonbury area that flowers twice a year, in Midwinter as well as in Spring. Folklore has grown around the trees and what was thought to be the original one was cut down during the English Civil War as it was seen to be attracting superstition – very much frowned upon in those times. As recently as 2010 the famous tree on Wesryall Hill was attacked. Folklore still stirs up strong feelings, for and against, but seems to hold on tenaciously, even in the modern world when it appears rather at odds with how people live. Something continues to draw us to the old myths and stories, they’re stubborn things, like the Glastonbury Thorn.

A tree that flowers in the middle of winter, at Christmas, is pretty good value symbolically of course and as I’ve got an exhibition coming up this December I thought it was a good place to start exploring the folklore of Midwinter and find a flavour for the exhibition. Here are a few more images of the development of the collage, from the preliminary thumbnail sketches to making the background and the final details:

Drawing is something I’ve neglected for ages; I know it’s important and good for my painting but I find it difficult so I’ve swept it under the carpet and kept telling myself I’d get around to it someday. Having more time for my artwork now I can’t put it off any longer and I’m picking up the pencil, charcoal and ink pens again. I still find it tough, most of my drawings end up looking timid, fussy or unfocused so I need to practice, practice, practice.

I’ve spent the last week travelling, first to London, then up to Lincolnshire to see the family, then back down to London and over to Berlin. Some paper and a few pens was all I could carry around most of the time so it’s been a good opportunity to do some sketching and try to start sharpening up my drawing skills. Here’s a charcoal and conté drawing from a photo I took of the arch at Mount Ephraim in Kent, this time including a bit of the lovely ‘Miz Maze’, a maze planted out with grasses which looks gorgeous in late summer:

Then another similar study from a photo I took of a clearing in the Grunewald forest on the outskirts of Berlin:

And here’s a sketchbook drawing from a walk up on Hampstead Heath last week:

I still find the drawing hard, but I’m actually starting to enjoy it, which is a good thing as I need to do lots more of it!

Some more of these monoprints; been working very small, about 3 inches across, while I get the hang of it before I go a bit bigger. Things photographing very poorly today for some reason.

The various gates, follies, arches and towers Ive been looking at in the last couple of weeks as I’ve been working on the ‘portals’ theme have provided some good motifs to try out new techniques or play around with putting different techniques together such as monoprinting and collage. Yesterday I made a few images using Wilder’s Folly as a starting point, a wonderful old tower built in 1796 near the village of Sulham in Berkshire. It’s now bricked up and was turned into a dovecote in the late 19th century, but I think it pretty well encapsulates the phrase ‘pleasing decay’, coined by John Piper, one of my favourite artists. Piper looked on buildings as living entities, and he valued their old age, seeing such places as a natural and essential part of the landscape. They certainly have character, and I love drawing and painting them. Here are a few more images; a couple of them I photographed early in the morning when the light was very warm so they look a bit different.

I’ve been playing with some cut-outs this morning to develop some more ‘portal’ images. The main arch elements here are a basic collagraph, both the original relief and a print made from it. I want to start experimenting with some figures to my work too, so I’ve included one. The cut-outs are great to play around with when working out compositions, you can change them instantly and try out dozens of different effects in just a couple of minutes.

When I began to think about making more portals recently I remembered a wonderful folly I  used to see when i visited Belton House. a beautiful country house and garden, owned by the National Trust, near where I grew up in Lincolnshire. I first came across it when I was a teenager, exploring the countryside on my bicycle; I looked up and in the distance I saw this pale gate set on a ridge above the road, looking mysterious and commanding. We used to visit Belton House often as a family, it’s a very beautiful place. My dad, when he was near the end of his life, came here with mum on a stunning autumn day, sat in the sunshine, looked about him at beautiful it all was, and had something of an epiphany, deciding then that he would make the most of his remaining time. And we were fortunate to have a few more weeks with him, in good spirits, although not long enough of course.

I’ve changed some of the architectural details: the new images i’m developing are not going to be studies of particular places but rather more other-wordly and mythological. Having been researching gates, arches and follies to go into the work I’m intrigued by how many weird and wonderful examples of this kind of thing there are dotted around the landscape so i’m not short of inspiration!

Here are a few studies from this morning and a page from the sketchbook:

The blog hop is an online artists’ project currently weaving it’s way around the globe whereby artists answer four questions about their work, post it online and nominate another artist to do the same the following week. I was touched to be nominated to do the honours this week by my friend Natalie D’Arbeloff who posted a great contribution last Monday. You can see the post and browse Natalie’s fabulous work on her website here. I’ve long been an admirer of her paintings, books, prints, drawings – I could go on and on, but suffice it say that Natalie is a true artist, the real deal – and she’s a very tough act to follow but i’ll do my best, so here goes:

What I am working on?

An interesting question right now as i’m just catching my breath after a group exhibition in Whitstable on the Kent coast in the South East of England. Putting the exhibition together with two friends, Phill Hosking and Phil Gomm was a terrific experience; you can scroll down to see my recent post about it or see it here, and here are a few images that were included in the show:

Hedgerow and Bullfinch, acrylic and collage on board, 20cms x 40cms, 2014

The Haunted House, acrylic and coloured pencil on paper, 15cms x 20cms, 2014

Portal, acrylic and collage on board, 30cms x 30cms, 2012

Just before the exhibition I gave up my ‘day job’ working for a local authority in London to devote more time to developing my artwork so it’s quite an exciting/scary time at the moment! After a show can be a strange period; sad that it’s all over, a bit empty and ‘what next?’ But i’ve already got lots of ideas and plans bubbling up and germinating so i’m going to be busy getting stuck into new work. This week I’ve been making some very quick studies using a sketch of an old architectural folly in the garden at Mount Ephraim, a beautiful country house in Kent as a starting point. I use collage a lot in my work, painting up the papers with different textures and then cutting, tearing and assembling to make the final image. In the early stages of working on an idea the technique is particularly useful as it is very quick indeed, and the individual elements can be moved and changed instantaneously to explore different juxtapositions and effects. I’m going to be exploring the  theme of ‘portals’ or gates in some new work so these studies are the first step to get ideas flowing for larger images:

I’m also starting to introduce some different techniques into the collage work that I’ve been making recently; here’s an image based on the facade of Peterborough Cathedral using a collagraph as a starting point:

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

For me, a recent contributor to the Blog Hop, Kris Wiltse, put it best when she wrote that ‘making pictures is like handwriting. I guess it’s the way I make my marks…’. That kind of says it for me, it’s the particular way I make marks more than anything. There are certainly plenty of other artists out there using similar techniques and covering similar subject matter to me but we each have our own ‘handwriting’ that make our work uniquely our own. I see other artists are moved by similar things to me; the ‘spirit of place’, stories and myths, the English countryside and folklore, but we each have our own voice. I came to painting seriously quite late in life, well into my ’40’s, so in some ways I’m still developing my particular artistic vision and language, but the journey has been very enjoyable these last few years. Here’s a collage from a couple of years ago that probably represents the approach I’ve been using recently quite well. In technique it utilises mainly collaged elements of papers worked over with acrylic, some monoprinting, masking and stencilling. The subject matter is also pretty representative, a unique landscape, in this case Dungeness, with a strong sense of place. In addition, the landscape here contains the interventions by Derek Jarman, a man who was many things, but for me expressed a particular kind of English genius and eccentricity:

Derek Jarman’s Garden, acrylic and collage on board, 20cms x 30cms, 2013

Why do I create what I do?

I create what I do because it’s an important way for me to express my experience of being alive. There are many ways of doing this, of course, but for me, making art is one of the main ones. I find life so mysterious, beautiful, heartbreaking, moving and magical I have to express it somehow and this is my particular way of doing that.

How does my creating process work?

I usually start with something that excites me, captures my interest or curiosity or that takes my breath away with it’s magic and beauty and then start to make thumbnail sketches or very quick collages to work out composition and the main forms. Here are a few recent collage studies about lighthouses. I was making a small folding book about these structures and this is how I got started:

From there I usually dive into making the final images, walking a tightrope by trying to allow the materials to do their own wonderful thing as much as possible, and giving it a nudge where necessary to keep the forms together, create space and depth or define something in particular. It can go either way; if I overwork it, it loses power and can be impossible to get going again, or if I don’t add enough it can lack focus. I work best in the morning and the evening, my mind and energy seem to be liveliest at these times and the afternoons I use to do other things. If I’m stuck I’ll have a good ol’ browse of other artists’s work to get ideas flowing or take my bicycle out for a few hours to find things that interest me or just for some thinking time. Talking things over with my hubby and friends is important too. I came away from the recent group exhibition with lots of ideas as I’d had the opportunity to discuss things with my co-exhibitors and I found this invaluable. The online community is so important too, of course; being an artist can be a rather solitary business, and making friends online, sharing feedback, ideas and images has become vital to getting exposure to all kinds of things going on. Hence my pleasure at being involved in the Blog Hop which I think is a thoroughly grand idea!

To finish, here are a couple of images of that lighthouse folding book and another book I made called Hedgecrows.

Ok, that’s me done. I’ll hand over now to my pal Dean Johnson, an artist based in Chicago. Dean and I made contact a couple of years ago via our blogs and I love the personal vision in his work and the clarity with which he communicates that vision. I’ve also learnt a lot from Dean along the way and I’m looking forward to his post next week. You can see Dean’s blog here – Ok Dean, over to you mate 🙂

Portals, doorways, gates, they’ve appeared in my work before; I guess i’m drawn to their symbolic qualities, the idea of passing through into another world, or being transformed somehow. I wonder if the fact that my 50th is only a few weeks away has anything to do with their re-emergence in the images i’m making! Anyway, as I was putting this little collagraph together yesterday a blogging friend from the US, Zoe Blue, commented on a previous post about the old barrack buildings i’d done earlier in the week, saying they looked like portals of some kind so the idea is obviously coming into the foreground of my mind one way or another. You can see Zoe’s most excellent blog here.

As we move through life from moment to moment we are always in a state of transition, I suppose, but the daily walk along our path is punctuated by more profound points in time. Some of these moments we can see coming a mile off (like my 50th) and can try and prepare for, but some we are confronted with suddenly, like the unexpected death of a loved one. Others we come across seemingly by accident, such as bumping into somebody in the street who goes on to become our partner or changes our lives in some way. Some key experiences we have to hunt out, we may not even know what we are searching for, driven only by a vague unease or longing for something we can’t quite pinpoint but we know when we find it – the lost doorway, overgrown with ivy, into the secret garden.

I made this image called ‘Portal’ a few years ago, and it was included in the recent exhibition I had with two friends in Whitstable. I was very happy that at the end of the show it was acquired by my friends Paul and Phil so I do get to see it again :-).

Portal, acrylic and collage on board, 30cms x 30cms, 2012

This week I’ve gone back to the subject matter and started to explore portals again. I made a crude collagraph and played around with some torn papers to start the ideas flowing and made lots of little studies, moving the papers around without sticking them down to see what happens. One example is at the top of this post and here are a few more:

The original Portal painting was based on an arch i’d seen at the Südgelände nature park just down the road from where we live in Berlin, but the collagraph I made this morning was inspired by a much older structure, a kind of folly standing in the beautiful gardens at Mount Ephraim in Faversham, Kent. The gate stands on it’s own in some trees, and there is an inscription over the door that goes something like ‘face towards the light so your shadow will always be behind you’, probably put more poetically but I think that was the gist, and rather nice. I’ll work these up some more and see where it goes…

And I must do something about my paper filing system!

When you have spent some time by the sea, it never quite leaves you. Galadriel’s words to Legolas are too true:

‘If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,

Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.’

I’ve lived by the sea twice in my life, once for a year on Ibiza, and again in Whitstable on the north Kent coast. Both experiences will stay with me always I think; the sound of the waves, the smell of the sea breeze, the vast horizon, there’s nothing quite like it.

I was back again last month putting up an exhibition in Whitstable, and walking out onto the beach at the end of the day I was rewarded by a glorious sunset. You can see why Turner loved the skies down here so much:

The sea went very calm, and turned a beautiful, milky mother-of-pearl colour before the real pyrotechnics began:

But even under the dullest skies the sea can be beautiful:

The collage at the top of this post is of the iconic old pub on the beach in Whistable, the Old Neptune. It’s probably been photographed and painted a million times and I’m sure the world doesn’t need any more images of this view, but I can’t help myself, it’s just do darn cute.

I took a train back to Berlin at the weekend after a busy couple of weeks in the UK doing the exhibition and seeing family and friends. It was so busy, in fact, I didn’t get much time to do any painting or drawing, so now I’m back my art table beckons and it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get working again. First job is to ‘get the eye in’ once more, so some quick, loose sketches.

A couple of streets away from our flat in the Red Island district is a complex of old Prussian army barracks, built of handsome old red brick and with lots of character. If these were in London they would, by now, be super gentrified, very expensive flats, but here in Berlin, there are still lots of dusty corners and they have not yet been discovered. The buildings currently house a collection of homes, studios, workshops and small businesses. Berlin reminds me a bit of London when I arrived in the 1980’s; beset with encroaching yuppification, but still largely old-fasioned and with plenty of quiet neighbourhoods that hadn’t realized they were about to become, Cinderella-like, ‘luxury, loft-style apartments for busy urban people’ or some such shite.

So the old barracks provide some nice subject matter for my morning sketches. These are a mixture of collage, stenciling, painting and drawing, and all pretty small scale, about 6×6 inches more or less.