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What is it about the etched line that gets me? I’m still not sure, but I think something to do with the scratched, ragged nature of it. Also, a certain, almost photographic nature to it, the same thing that attracts me to old silver type photos. A certain darkness. Most of my ‘lines’ these days […]

I know the importance of rest, the trouble is, it’s so hard to enact in this world I live in. Emerging out of the (rather wet) summer holidays, I was starting my run up to leap into all the things I said ‘I’ll do in September’, when, mid-leap, Covid felled me. I seem to get

When I moved to South Bristol in 1998, as a student, the area was run down, cheap to live in, and the only places to go out were small, scary, ‘old man’ pubs. The area’s changed beyond comprehension now. Some might call it gentrification, but there’s certainly a lot to be grateful for in the

Conclusion: Much more of a slog. But still worth it. If you don’t know, the 100 day project invites people to do one thing everyday for 100 days, recording it, or not, on social media, usually Instagram. The idea being that all those little bits of creativity teach you something, and added up, mean something

I recently visited Tate Modern and caught the Maria Bartuszova exhibition. No, I hadn’t heard of her either. It could be that my knowledge of Eastern European 20th century, female artists is lacking. There again, it could be that our collective knowledge of Eastern European, 20th century, female, artists is lacking. The exhibition was a

I was lying in bed, thinking about death- as you do- and imagining looking back over my life. Would it have been a life of selling art or making art? An art business or ‘being an artist’? I suppose the former has ‘grubby’ (why?) connotations of doing things for money, the everyday-ness we all struggle

Yes, I’ve been pulled in by the lure of ‘going big’ as most artists do at some point. Having been essentially a printmaker, working on paper, for most of my career, I’ve recently been straining at the leash. I want to make immersive art, gestural and bold- and the feeling won’t go away. The downside

I went to see Lisa O’Neill, an Irish folk (and so much more) singer at St Georges in Bristol last month. I booked the tickets on the strength of one song heard by chance on the radio- a rare occurrence for me. When I arrived, it seemed lots of others had done the same, which

It snowed. In March. Almost unheard of in the warmer and wet South West. I spent a few minutes watching it float down from our small, awkwardly shaped patch of sky, out the back, between the rooves, chimneys and drain pipes. White on white. Actually grey on grey. The more I looked, the more I

It wasn’t much of a sunrise, truth be told. I walked out along the coast path, hoping for a spectacle, or even a moment of…something, against the implication of the grey blanket of cloud. I reached the field I love the most. Somehow the camber, the line and roll of it warms my heart, like