Drawing temperature

Another boiling hot day in the studio, as the sun pours in the skylights. Didn’t help that the heating was on first thing this morning, for some unknown reason! So, […]

Drawing myself into the day

Excuses, excuses, excuses: no point in postponing drawing because I am not feeling up to it. The only thing to do is to start: to draw myself into the day, […]

Guilded!

Now all I have to do is let it dry overnight, brush the surplus off in the morning, and see what I have got. My first time: god was I nervous!

Hot, chalk, gold

Phew! Sweating away here in the studio. It is so hot today that everything is working double quick. The glue I am using to seal the chalk is drying in […]

How to wear your sword

I dropped in on Dr. Nick Thorpe in the Archaeology Department of the University of Winchester the other day. We talked all around how chalk appears from our past: artefacts, the […]

Chalk tractor

A visit to the chalk quarry yesterday, in the blazing sunshine, which made it very difficult to see anything thanks to chalk’s high albedo. The quarry was a flash of […]

Ehux, a marvel of…

If there is something of a celeb in the coccolithophore world, then it seems to be Ehux (Emiliania huxleyi), the one named after Henry Thomas Huxley. The coccoliths that make up […]

Washing his hands…

Tom Jeffreys has kindly included ‘Forgetful Worlds’ as one of the highlights of the Clean Unclean season on the online journal The Learned Pig. It has been a fascinating collection of works, […]

Return to the bittern

Early sketches for a film based on the wonderful prose-poem that Eleanor Holliday created as part of the work I made for the Cotswold Waterpark residency, A Space for the Bittern. It is […]

No.4 with gold

Last one this week: here is the beginning of the 4th chalk drawing in the series. I am looking at including gold leaf (that a small square of the stuff to the […]

Knowing when to stop

Ah, the chance to revise, what a double-edge chalk. One advantage/disadvantage (circle correct word) of working on a series of drawings is that you can go back and modify an earlier attempt in the […]

Drawing your way forward

Some days, the only thing that makes sense is to draw. The rest of the world is too complicated. I am getting into this series of drawings now: working on No.3 […]

Open Studio…ish

It is the Stroud Open Studios this and next weekend – do come! Eighty two artists will be showing their work, and in the case of Stroud a studio can be anything […]

Back to art school

All the life drawing classes I have attended in the past (models of various sizes in various poses, the odd mix of people behind the easels), making a painting of a mackerel for […]

Parabolic incision

Today, in the studio, working on ideas for three chalk boulders, each incised with a golden parabola.

First outing for the Library Digester

The Library Digester (seen here in its travelling case) is a structure designed to disrupt library shelves, the clear acrylic ‘books’ (with the imprint of a tree branch within) slotting […]