dreg zine
selfie
The ground was A4 paper coated with gesso and painted some months ago with surplus oil paint. The sketch as made in oxide of chromium tints, the background made of ultramarine, Indian yellow and zinc white, the face shaped in tints of Indian yellow and permanent rose, using the underlying green sketch to mute these colours.
one year …
One year ago today I left hospital in a wheel chair after a three and a half weeks stay having high dose chemotherapy and an autograft, followed by the inevitable toxicity, sepsis and deconditioning. I find it amazing to remember how ill I was, and how good it feels to have recovered. I was reminded of this when, doing my own ward round today, I stood outside the door of the very side room where I had been isolated.
In the weeks that followed I kept my skills alive through Draw Brighton’s portrait club. I’ve already posted my own sketches as I did them but here are a series of others’ drawings of me, accidentally showing my hair growing back.
it’s sometimes hard to get the names right of your fellow artists in these sessions.
House of Music
Peter Doig’s exhibition at the Serpentine, House of Music.
My brief notes read “Chalky paint quality – more like gouache than oil. Strong simple perspectives, figures and shapes imposed upon geometric constructions. Not photorealistic. Stylised. Lots of lions (symbolic). High contrast, light and dark. Dark figures do not denote so-called race … but maybe. One figure like a radiograph.
I also stayed for the fabulous playlist played on giant analogue speakers rescued from derelict cinemas, with the audience sitting on the floor in front of Doig’s painting Rain in the Port of Spain 2015 (third sketch down).
while we look away
Genocide continues while we look away.
Even before this recent attack on Iran by Israel and the United States, lacking military objectives, serving primarily to distract from domestic political challenges, even before the current terrible events, the world had looked away from Gaza and the West Bank and the lethal oppression continued. These sketches were from the march against genocide in London five weeks ago.
Wall
These two studies were made in memory of the two hundred communists machine gunned in the firing range 1st May 1944 as revenge for a partisan attack in Nazi occupied Greece. Last week, it was reported that rare photographs had surfaced and been retained by the state for posterity.
Mass state killing is an intrinsic part of fascism (or authoritarian governments ruling through fear and violence). As in the 1930s. we are now being given choices whether to vote fascists into power, or to resist elected fascists while there are still constitutional mechanisms to do so.
The collage materials were watercolour sketches sliced into thin strips and glued to thin paper, and tissue paper previously used to mop up surplus oil paint and allowed to dry.
Leporello
This leporello was made in collaboration with Open College of the Arts photography student Louise Alderman and Creative Arts student Baiba Hermanns, tasked to generate a piece of work with the starting point “light and dark” over three weeks. We developed the theme into a structuralist visual narrative that shuttled between opposing concepts, generated by taking turns to give a visual prompt or response. The running commentary came from a fast word game, again taking turns, to offer thesis, antithesis, synthesis for each image pair. We each spoke for two minutes on the collaborative process while the others took short notes: I combined those summaries into what became a poem.
Mycelium
I set our to represent the hidden mycelium network in the soil, interconnecting tree roots.
This was a response to a monochrome photographic image, by Open College of the Arts Fine Arts student Baiba Vagule, of twigs, leaves and sycamore seeds, emblematic of visible tree growth.
I had to do experimentation with ink, water and bleach to get the effect I wanted. Words were excised form a pdf of a scientific paper exploring the mathematics of mycelium growth in response to environmental constraints. The overlaid words were discoloured by the damp layers beneath.
The jogger
This collage was done on paper cut from a carrier bag. The photographs were all taken quickly on a walk with the dog. The human figures were chance inclusions in wider images, that I then resized on the computer. The sunlight on the wood panel floor of the book shop was imposed into this park composition, giving a sense of light and of perspective. The man with a delivery on a trolley was deliberately placed in the final composition so his size was diminished in comparison with the advancing runners, rather than the more representative approach in the initial placings.
A few days later, I had a palette of surplus paint, oxide of chromium green, Indian yellow, cadmium red, zinc white, cerulean and ultramarine blues, all wet with Gamblin solvent fee medium. The original run-in-the-park collage had elements of perspective built in, so I worked with this, reserving some of the lighter toned collage pieces, applying paint with a plastic rectangle angled to create the illusion of receding flat space, partly a surface, partly submerging the runner.
Schrodinger’s scan
This collage was made on an old bit of foamboard that had been used as a support for paper being treated with ink and bleach, and some of this seeped through. I am not sure where the straight lines came from, but anyway these started the idea of the box … the black box with the quantum trigger, in which is utterly concealed a cat simultaneously in a state of life and death until the box is opened, then the probability cloud collapses into one reality.
I thought about the play on words, a cat or CAT (computer assisted tomography) scan which uses a program to rebuild detailed X-ray data from a donut shaped scanner into serial slices through the body called tomograms. I also thought about cats being a kind of pet. PET (positron emission tomography) scans build CAT images with X-rays overlaid with anatomical data generated by triangulating the perpendicular linear radiation from an injected radiolabelled sugar that is selectively taken up in areas of high metabolism, including normal organs such as liver and brain but also malignant deposits.
The analogy with the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment is this. After CAT or PET information is reconstituted as images, the scans must be interpreted, the result sent to a clinician, and the interpretation communicated to the patient on an appointed day. This represents the black box: time from scan to revelation. The patient is the cat, simultaneously in state of remission and relapse. Only when the result is told does the probability matrix collapse into one reality.
Last month, I had a PET scan. Between scan and result I imagined myself in that quantum state and thought about how to realise it in a piece of art.
However, before I could execute this work, the clinician, who by chance is also my line manager at work, emailed me the pdf of the report with the brief message “Great result. Keep up the good work”. I was indeed working that day so did not open the pdf until the evening with my wife, The email message had already begun to shift the probability cloud toward remission, so the box had been opened slightly for a peek, and this was confirmed on reading the report. The probability matrix has collapsed: I am in remission, at least for now.
One effect was that I could not undertake this art work in the state of uncertainty as planned, and this is merely a retrospective on that memory. The box is opened and from the quantum cloud the confined cat emerges very much alive and somewhat pissed off.
I covered the foamboard with non opaque gesso to give it tooth and inked again the blacks to get greater contrast. I used mainly photographs taken as references for painting exercises, particularly of woodland, and of decaying sunflowers.
kestrelart 
