I have an exhibition starting this weekend. It’s in a relatively small room adjacent to a larger dining area and bar at The Reliance in Leeds. It’s a complete contrast to the white wall environment of my other current exhibition at Redbrick Mill in Batley, where glossy immaculate digitally reconstructed urban landscapes adorn the space. The Reliance show is not exhibiting final resolved pieces. It’s a small intimate room with dark green walls lending itself to a variety of sm

The tendency after any sort of show for me is to sink into a state of overwhelming lassitude. Psychologically, I’m on a roll, but with no energy to take advantage of the creative run. Except when there’s no time to sit and recover. So this week, my attention has been fully and 100% focussed on The Other Art Fair happening towards the end of this month. There’s far too much to do even without finishing off work, but it’s just too good an opportunity to miss having a new major

I’d hoped to find a way of posting these daily tasters on the fb event page but the system is defeating me. I have to admit some days I feel quite anxious about fb. I never quite know what will pop up where and how many times. #art #contemporaryart #westbournegrove #digitaldrawing #digitalpainting

Westbourne Grove (a portrait of everyday) (detail of collage element) It’s been a while… but things get busy… the drawings are coming thick and fast now. Every one develops in its own manner. it’s strange how the hand is the same but the technique makes so much difference to the outcome. Even working instinctively and intuitively, sometimes from one hour to the next, it’s amazing how differently the work emerges. If you’ve missed the details of the November event in London, l

All done. Save mounting and finishing. The great thing about seeing any idea through to completion is the way I want to immediately start work on the next one. Working all hours every day to meet a deadline sets me on a roll which is a really nice feeling. The opposite to coming back from holiday, say, where the desire to get my head down is there but somehow it takes for ever to get back in the swing. Not so today though. I’m straight back in. #art #contemporaryart #Identity

Tore away the masking tape this afternoon. I quite like it. Bit more to do tomorrow then it’s done. It’s at the abstract stage: the content and composition is all but forgotten as all that matters now is paint and painting. #art #contemporaryart #layers #Painting

Between now and my deadline for this painting, I have chauffeur, chef, housemaid, teaching and advisory duties making lengthy studio visits nigh impossible. Since I don’t like to leave a painting in the final stages, this is potentially a problem. Unless I make a virtue out of a necessity. To keep the freshness of the final painting, I’m sectioning off as much as I can do on a brief pop-in visit, and will proceed to work rapidly on each little part. A sort of real life photos

Ah, the joy of an unexpectedly glorious “failure”. I was trialling the opalescent screen and shadow puppets today. It’s fair to say I had no idea what to expect with these colored puppets I’m making. They’re not dependent on a clear black shadow outline, and a good thing too, because despite using the “correct” weight of card, I have some buckling of the card, and the figure I was using did not always lie flat against the screen. In other words, in purist terms, not “successf

It’s funny how ideas evolve. This blog series for example: I had no real Idea of what was going to happen, what I was going to post, but I’m happy so far that it’s establishing some firm of direction on this exploration of risk, play and creativity. I’m appreciative of all the comments I’ve had, and it’s lovely to have conversations about this aspect of making art which I find so fascinating. Today has been spent messing with fixing methods for limbs. And more playing with p

I play around a lot with the iPhone camera. I like its severe limitations. #art #iPhonephotos #photography #postaday2011 #digitalart #iPhoneography #Selfportrait

#adailyselfreflection on sleeping whilst awake #art #adailyselfreflection #Ipad #postaday2011 #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

Just once or twice over the months have I incorporated other images from this series, but today I used three or four apps in composing and creating this work because I was playing around with layers and framing and colour manipulation as well as the main drawing. #art #postaday2011 #digitalart #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

I thought this would be more of a figure drawing and more ‘finished’ but I stopped because I liked the left eye. #art #adailyselfreflection #digitaldrawings #Portraiture #Ipad #postaday2011 #digitalart #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

Running late every which way this morning so I was set for a chaotic speedy image and the chaos and speed was easy enough but then I tried Clever Things with layer blending and spent as long again recovering the image. #art #adailyselfreflection #Portraiture #Ipad #postaday2011 #digitalart #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

Sometimes I have no desire to look into the mirror at all, or gaze at a webcam image, and seeing myself in the mind’s eye is as close to reality as any other ‘vision’. #art #adailyselfreflection #digitaldrawings #Portraiture #postaday2011 #digitalart #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

It’s all about not painting enough with real paint but in the fantasyland of iPad apps it’s not a problem. #art #adailyselfreflection #Portraiture #Ipad #postaday2011 #digitalart #digitalpainting #Selfportrait

Today I realised I spent yesterday drowning in detail. All I wanted to do today was to be able to take a step back, see the big picture, regain a sense of perspective. I found myself posing in an uncustomary flamboyant manner, and drawing a cloud shape of my occupied space. At one point I felt compelled to go in and detail the face but then backed off and sprayed virtual aerosol spray paint over the features to subdue it within the overall image again. Challenge for today. Re

forcing myself to use a constant line to depict form and volume #adailyselfreflection began when I realised there was a great forum in cyberspace for showing digitally generated work, and I loved the idea that artwork with no tangible existence could be viewed in the exact form in which it had been created. I began with Twitter, and then understood that Twitter was so much more. I found myself on a social media workshop series which I have blogged about in my Life and Art blo