Summer Exhibition

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Not THE Summer Exhibition perhaps, but it was important to me as opportunities to do a solo show don't come along that often.  It's a very interesting process, trying to decide what's in and what's out.  If you are quite prolific, there is a lot to choose from and it forces you to become a harsh editor of your own work, to recognise what is good and what is not so good on a wall.


Most of the images I have made in my working life have been done for a reason, a narrative in a book or a film or to enhance a piece of writing in a magazine so its been quite an adventure to make work for no other reason than the image itself.  I'm still not sure it's really me but it has been liberating.
Here are a few pics from the exhibition, more to come.







I tried to make the most of this exhibition and even dedicated some of our family rainy camping holiday on the Scilly Isles to painting.  Most of the work that made it through the curating process was landscape but the ones that everyone liked the best were figurative.  Thats so typical of me, I always think Cornwall is all about landscape but I learned through doing this that you should be true to yourself.  People want to see what you really love doing in painting and for me that is probably people.

The one I like best and could probably live with at home.

So that's the painting side of things.  There are a few more, which I'll put up soon, including some figurative ones but from now on all my efforts must be concentrated on the film I'm making with my colleague, Derek Hayes.  It's called 'Deep' and has occupied my a lot of summer.

Here is the blog about it:
http://makingdeep.blogspot.co.uk/


Animation Backgrounds

Animation Backgrounds

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Here are some of my animation backgrounds from various productions in the 1990's. I and others painted hundreds over the years, often working into the small hours to make sure we delivered on time. Always there was a balance to be struck between speed and quality. Getting the style of the production right would take a couple of weeks at first and then I'd be away, gathering speed in my little workroom, tuned into Radio 4. It's not a job for the gregarious person perhaps but I enjoyed being cocooned in my own little world. One of things it taught me was to think of style as superficial thing, a veneer that matters less than the substance, i.e. the idea or the drawing. But style is important too, it's just that it's sometimes used to mask weak substance. Here's a tiny sample of my animation backgrounds, some of the few that made it to the photocopy shop on the mad dash down the Tottenham Court Road to deliver work. These two backgrounds we
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Agapanthus In Progress

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I'm working on some hotel pictures again and I thought I'd put some up even though they are a bit unfinished.  I don't want to overwork them but the flowers need more fullness so I'll add some more of the white gouache blobs with my sponge at the studio next week. I'm quite pleased with the freshness of these.
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Coffee

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Just a quick one to post this image of a street cafe in Italy. I painted it at the last minute for my exhibition last summer and it turned out to be the most popular one. It's 1m square, acrylic on canvas and I have only just got round to taking a photo of it.
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