Fixing the friable

Happy to be working with Gavin McClafferty again (who built the furniture for the installation at Waterhay last year). This time we are trying to work out how best to fix the chalk drawings […]

Life goes where the energy flows

Summer’s over! Time to get back to work. Had my time by the lake, eating cake drinking coffee, swinging in the hammock reading (and struggling at times with) Nick Lane’s The Vital […]

A certain forgetting is needed

It was Dan who mentioned that we had left the falcon hood behind by now. The more we have been working on the 3D scan, fitting it to the dimensions […]

Ahhhhhh!

Working with Dan this morning: got this far and then the software glitched…ahhhhhh! Dan, I guess try again another day.

A wormhole on the Test

I visited the famous Oakley Beat yesterday, on the River Test. I guess this sentence need a little explanation: the Test is a chalk stream in Hampshire and one of the […]

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 […]