My friend Nick Archer is having a show at 60 Threadneedle Street in London at the moment, so we got invited up for the preview showing. Anyway, not only was it a great opportunity to spend time with Michelle and see Nick’s work, it was also lovely to see a part of London that we wouldn’t ordinarily visit. I mean, unless you work in the financial sector of the city, London Bridge and Threadneedle Street are a bit off the beaten track. In fact it’s a track only usually beaten by hand made shoes and the odd lost tourist.

But the City has a lot to offer. Poking out between the roofs of the financial sector is gilt top of Monument, a Roman Doric column to commemorate the Great Fire in 1666 and next to The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (The Bank of England) is the impressive building of The Royal Exchange founded by Elizabeth the first and even equipped with a statue of the Duke of Wellington to boot (sorry, bad pun).

On arrival, we came out of London Bridge station with Michelle saying “Where’s The Shard? You’d think it’d be hard to miss”. It was looming behind us like an enormous monolith of glass and steel, but that’s the problem with big cities, the buildings are so large that it’s easy to miss even something as big as The Shard.

Anyway, here are the couple of tourist snaps I shot from the bridge and some of Nick’s work:

View from London Bridge.

The last one is my favourite, but at 152cm square and £16,000 I might have to make the sacrifice and let someone else buy it.

If you want to see more of his work, he’s at: http://nicholasarcher.com/NicholasArcher.html

‘Zoe and Rags’ was for a surprise birthday present and all had to be kept under wraps until it was handed over. I couldn’t even ring or text the client! However, somehow it all went smoothly and I now have permission to show the painting.

So here she is, Zoe and her dog Rags:

This is the only snap I have and it was taken on a phone, so apologies for the quality. The dog is suffering from reflected light a little, he’s darker in real life.

Building mode me has now virtually completed the cupboards and even managed a mantelpiece/fire-surround too. It’s been a sort of build a cupboard and get a free fireplace deal. Well I figured in for a penny, in for a pound and this way I don’t have to switch to builder mode again any time soon in order to build the mantelpiece, because it’s built!

However, now I have to get my mind focused on being creative again. Honestly it feels like the mental equivalent of turning a huge ship before it hits the rocks, or pulling up an old aircraft from a steep dive. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but getting back in the proverbial “zone” seems… tricky.

Today though was a sunny day and I was working outdoors in the countryside and few places in the world are more beautiful than the Sussex countryside in Springtime. Buzzards were circling the fields looking for mice and voles, male pheasants were arguing over who gets the girl and a cuckoo was calling in the distance while a yellow Brimstone butterfly floated lazily past me. So as the Primroses were out too, I snapped a couple of shots on my phone.

Wood Anemones and Celendine

Primroses

Celendine. Hard to dislike this one even though it’s a really invasive weed. On a sunny day like today I could forgive its megalomaniac tendencies.

The only blot on today’s idyllic events is the major sunburn I’m now nursing on the back of my neck! Too much of a good thing obviously.

I know you shouldn’t compare yourself to someone else, down that road lies disappointment and inferiority, but, if you’re asking yourself if you’re any good, then comparison is inevitable. Happily in my case that comparison is evoking more of a challenge to exceed my current abilities, but comparison could just as easily lead to what used to be called melancholia… the blues.

“A boy who practices painting too much may be overcome by melancholy. He should learn to play string instruments and thus be distracted to cheer his blood” – Albrecht Dürer

I mean, look at young Edgar Degas. If you look at some of the detail in his paintings – detail that I’d sweat buckets over – it’s terrible! Hands that on close inspection are nothing but a few raw, loose brush strokes that at a distance look depressingly sublime. That sort of skill could easily lead you to what Dürer calls melancholia indeed.

Just look at this: (Mademoiselle Hélène Rouart)

I couldn’t sleep at night if I left a hand looking like that, but Degas could. He could see the image as a whole without sweating the tiny details. In fact if he had sweated the tiny details his images would have lost much of their vibrancy. That said, he did get looser in technique as he matured and was much tighter stylistically in his youth. Old age obviously agreed with him.

One of the problems I have is that I’m somewhat isolated from my peers, not part of an artistic community. My family see my work, but they see it at every stage of development, so by the time I’ve finished a piece they’ve seen it for days/weeks and I’m lucky if I get a “uh huh, nice”. I often feel similarly.

My wife Michelle has suggested I cover it up, so that when it’s finished I can unveil the painting with a “ta dah!” Accompanied no doubt by rapturous applause, the popping of champagne corks and gasps of wonder from my assembled family, perhaps even a shed tear and an exclamation of “my goodness, such beauty!”.

However this isn’t the present reality and I have to wrestle with my doubts myself. What seems a little disturbing, is that the more I paint the greater the self doubt and it would seem I’m not alone. Many of my art heroes seem to have suffered the same affliction and it makes me wonder if there is a link to creativity and depression. I mean, if I’m gonna end up like poor Vincent I might need a less strenuous career like professional cage fighter or primary school teacher, and people say art is relaxing.

For now I’m taking all this as a challenge, a provocation to step things up a gear, to continue to go where no me has ever gone before. After all, with each project I undertake I learn something new. The current project is no exception, it’s taught me a lot and considering I’ve probably only done less than perhaps ten oil paintings in total ever, I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Unless Degas’ first ten paintings were masterpieces of course…

If Robert Hughes (Australian born art critic) was correct then we’ve all got reason to hope. For he said:

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

Anyway, here she is – Lily. This one is painted mostly from reference photographs, but I’m thinking that to get more depth I’m going to perhaps start working from live models.

My eldest son Joe has been building a folding guitar for a school exam project and whilst helping him the other day I thought the shed might make a good place to play with the Nikon. Anyway here are a few shots of that quintessentially English of buildings, the garden shed.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Basically I added one of those duff iPhone apps that does nothing but illuminate your screen with a selections of colours in the pretense of it being a “torch”. It’s not very torchy, but it does work pretty well to paint light with.

All I did was rest the DSLR on a solid surface, set it for a longish exposure, suppressed the flash and got my son to wave my iPhone (3Gs)  around in front on the camera with the screen set (in this case) to pale blue.

Anyway, we had fun:

It wasn’t the most glorious exercise. For starters I dropped my new DSLR on the road as I took it out of the car and cracked the case, which was an event that forced a pressured decision (and an outburst of bad language). Should I get back in the car and sulk over the damage, or get on with taking some shots in the sub-zero temperatures and winds on the hills above Eastbourne.

I decided to freeze for my art.

May I add at this point, that if you’ve never used a tripod with a detachable plate before, trying to do so in the dark when you can’t feel the tips of your fingers is probably not the best time to start!

Anyway, I got a couple of shots off in the pitch black and to my surprise the biggest issue was too much light! That and trying to keep the tripod still in between gusts of wind. I also need to read the manual and work out how to cancel the rear screen display, so that I’m not intermittently blinded when I’ve got my eye to the view-finder right next to it while working in the dark.

The results were educational, which is cool. At least I’m learning something right? The best shot was a long exposure of a passing car. What I was aiming to shoot, were the lights of the town in the distance, but the passing car was much more interesting as it turned out.

Here they are:

Passing car.

Eastbourne at night…. hmmm. Need more experience, but not too embarassing considering the arctic conditions, for a first go.