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Letting the brush play and taking what’s left li

Letting the brush play and taking what’s left literally is a time-honoured way to bring the unexpected (or unbidden) into picture-making. Whether the picture pops out of thin air (thin being the operative word) or is wrenched from swirling fog, how a picture can come about this way is really fascinating for me to work on but as the viewer am I so happy to pass the time with it? Does it get me looking with anywhere near the same interest, let alone intensity ? Sometimes we get there. These aren’t they.

The brush play in bright blue is flat and thin. The shapes the paint-play makes describe the space between things. This leaves the white paper between the brush strokes to appear as solid forms, an optical illusion which renders the brush marks I made invisible. Okay, less obvious.

Then it was that I took the shapes that were left literally, assigned each a character and set to work but all I’ve done is fill ‘em in.

On another note - in the old house-style, a little

Portrait of Ulrich, Mr Rosendahl; Painting for a s

Portrait of Ulrich, Mr Rosendahl; Painting for a surgeon; Stephanie being seen by Professor Collins; Monotypes after learning of diagnosis.

Four weeks since Stephanie’s open heart surgery.
So far so painful but I can see - huge improvement.
Echo & X-ray yesterday, surgeon happy with results.
Follow-up today, saw Mr Rosendahl (not in his scrubs but in his office in a suit)I and seeing him be pleased with a job done well - immensely reassuring. He did add that Stephanie’s stenosis was critical, her heart could have failed any day.
It’s an odd thing anxiety - it’s there and then, if we’re lucky enough to know its cause and know it’s not there anymore, it isn’t. It goes away, Evaporates.
I only noticed a difference taking the hospital stairs yesterday from four weeks ago. It wasn’t in my step, it was the way I examined the walls, a hundred worries simply were not there anymore.
Now I can only reflect on the Insidious effect it has when you are in its grip. It’s not an emotion you want to hang onto. It must have its uses. When unwelcome events crowd in but…. Anxiety, when it isn’t hanging heavily penetrates everywhere in everything you do even when you think you’re distracted, fully-focused on other things, a brittle edge creeps in …when flexible is wot wheeze likes to be

New Valve for Stephanie It happened happened fast

New Valve for Stephanie It happened happened fast .
On 3rd June in the space of an hour a pain in Stephanie’s foot made it impossible to stand on it.
“This is different. This isn’t the chronic fatigue. Something has changed.” Her GP dismissed her concerns, “It’s normal in old-age to have aches and pains” and offered support stockings. Within three weeks we were in A&E at St Mary’s in Paddington. Stephanie’s blood pressure had shot up to over 240. We were lucky to have a very good doctor look at Stephanie- who, when it got to your turn, was totally focused, very gentle and listened. Carefully. Not only to what you say but with his stethoscope. Doctors don’t do this anymore.
“There is something wrong with a valve in your heart.” He said. “Your GP must refer you for an echo cardiogram” Dr Sayeed, I think was his name, did what tests he could do in the midnight hours and around three or four in the morning he sent us home. Weirdly the GP continued to baulk at the idea. Eventually on 2nd September Stephanie had the echo at Willesden Community Health Centre. Heard nothing until a phone call on Saturday morning, 25th Sept. “Has anyone been in touch to tell you result of the echo? You have aortic stenosis. The aortic valve in your heart is struggling to work. It’s serious approaching critical. It is urgent you seek treatment.

We were lucky again. Someone who knows said you don’t want a cardiologist you want a valve specialist.
On Wednesday we were in Professor Collins office. He is Mr Optimism. He gave us over to his top man, Ulrich Rosendahl, who, when we got to see him is forthright, blunt but sharp, immensely reassuring. “People who have heart valves in your condition are not usually able to walk across a room.”

We only got to have one day of shiny, happy-eyed confidence. By the day after Stephanie was scheduled for the knife in the next few days.
Hop, skip and a jump!
Within three weeks of hearing about the problem Stephanie was in pre-op prep which is where these drawings begin. Day zero is the day of the procedure and on day seven they send you home. That’s tomorrow, Friday. And these are some of the drawings I’ve been doing sitting beside the girl

Two hours of rapid-fire free-form drawing Muji ma

Two hours of rapid-fire free-form drawing
Muji make a brush pen. I buy a handful at a time use them randomly never know when one will run out of ink. Here I’ve allowed a stream of consciousness to determine where I take the line. Which means I barely pause to consider before where next to make a move.
Had a bunch of distractions which have kept me away from painting recently. There are always little observations to go in the sketchbook between engagements but a couple of hours to myself with no calls on my time - I start a line and see where it takes me. First it is all along the ground, everything the line describes seems to be planted firmly on an imaginary plane…, plain.., on the level, as they say in the Masons Arms.
Then as the ink runs out forms fade away into a field. Take a new brush pen and stay with the flat field. Delicate touch as soft as clouds then coming out of, through there, the forms and figures which emerge float free of gravity whether in water or in air, fish or fowl….

Time soon to be taking students out drawing again.

Time soon to be taking students out drawing again. Here’s a trip we took to Tate Modern in the first week of Illustration students starting their degree course a couple of years ago.
I recognise Ronnie concentrating behind the mask.
Newbies then they’ll be coming back as third years soon. Seasoned hands, ready for one more round before they fledge in May then off into the world as novices again. Oh it does fly

Opening tonight, exhibition at Galerie de Grote R

Opening tonight, exhibition at
Galerie de Grote Ruutten, Oostende

Got going with some pictures - in the old house-st

Got going with some pictures - in the old house-style - with one exception, an eagle-eye view of a Rocky Mountain scene with a spiral intervention painted to surprise an Egyptian chef in a Flemish kitchen. It’s three years since I promised to paint him a picture he could escape to the mountains with. I know the scene he’d rather be taken to would be beside a none too awesome but lively mountain waterfall gushing ‘tween boulders dark by green and mossy banks …with distant snow capped peaks ?
I think I know the one

Pictures painted this month. Some in the old hous

Pictures painted this month.
Some in the old house-style - setting colour traps.
Going from eyes-catching to optical illusion in a sometimes vertiginous slide.
We latch onto a detail and kind of assume the rest.
Most of the time it tallies
now and again it really doesn’t
then we need to switch
from fitting to a pattern to digging out a meaning.
Only that these are pictures
as sensible as the world is sane and
as we stare at them
the stories
fold in on themselves
shaped as much by our own clunky shifts of perception as by the slippery changes of scale and emphasis that is the paint
.

Ambiguous pictures - if you can be bothered to loo

Ambiguous pictures - if you can be bothered to look for long enough at the more subtle of these coloured drawings different levels of imagery begin to appear - apparitions, optical illusion, shifts of meaning or alternative readings of visual clues - call them what you will, you know you make them up.
Why would you bother?
What does it do?
It’s not always comfortable viewing trying to figure out what’s what with these kinds of pictures - every point of focus, the place where our eye lands, ought to confirm (through experience) what we know to be the case but here the visual clues. which catch our eye and invite interpretation, pull us first in one and then another direction.
Each one has a payback - a sudden change of scale, a link to a figure, to a set of interactions, or maybe simply a pleasing abstract shape with no other intention to it, nothing more meaningful than to be itself.
Not all of these pics are nearly so rich and complex, only two I’d say, the others are quick-hit double takes, some silly, some unpleasant, it’s a matter of taste. What you see is what you get.
You get it quick then move on by.
What’s it good for?
Agile thinking.
Will that do?

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