Friday, January 11, 2013

Three Dark Cherries

Three Dark Cherries
 Oil on linen on MDF
 $120
sold

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Pencil Sharpened at Both Ends

Pencil Sharpened at Both Ends
 Oil  MDF

This one should make up for the pencils with no point!  One of the reasons I havn't been painting much recently is that I've been pursuing my other passions of music and building things. I'm at present building a stratocaster style guitar. You can read about it here  on my Another Day blog if anyone is interested or curious. 

My other ongoing project is playing around with music making software, a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW . The technology we have available to us now gives ordinary people like myself something we could only dream of a mere decade ago. It's possible now to have a fully equipped recording studio that would have been worth hundred of thousands of dollars only a few years ago, on a personal computer for only a few hundred dollars!  Click here for my Soundcloud page of musical madness and nonesence. I've always loved music as well as painting. I enjoy playing guitar and in recent years have started playing drums. I don't kid myself that I'm particularly good at it, but I enjoy it!  And I have reached the time in my life where I come to the sobering realisation that this life is not a dress rehearsal... there's so many things I would like to try my hand at before I'm through..

Painting is the thing I'm good at but I feel totally disenfranchised by the Art World. I'm fiftyfive years old and have been painting for over thirty years now, struggling to get a toe in a door that seems to be permanantly closed to me. I am now capable of producing work that is of very high quality and yet it seems to go largely unnoticed. I still struggle to get shown in real world gallerys which is why I started this blog. So all this is by way of saying that I'm finally through trying. I've been through all the deppression and sense of failure and inevitable bitterness. By deliberately not putting myself in that position of feeling that I "have to paint" because I'm a painter, I feel a lot happier about life than I have been for a long time. There are all these other things that I can do and I don't have to be particularly good at them! It's fun and exciting learning new things!

And so... a pencil sharpened at both ends...

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Buttercup x Two


Buttercup x Two
Oil on ceramic tile
 $100

Two buttercup miniatures on ceramic tiles. Two for the price of one. Hurry! Hurry!

Two Ramshorn Shells

Two Ramshorn Shells
 Oil on linen on MDF

Sans Pencil

Sans Pencil
 Oil on Ivory mounted on Rosewood

This one was actually painted before the last one I just posted. I like this one better too, I've got a backlog of paintings I havn't gotten around to posting. It's always difficult thinking up titles and I try not to be too twee. But I remember thinking of the Shakesphere quote from the "all the world's a stage" soliloquy... well, sans teeth sans eyes sans pencil...

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Arrangement of Old Bottles With Black Pawn

Arrangement of Old Bottles With Black Pawn
Acrylic on Cotton

Every now and then I like to use acrylics to remind myself how much I love painting with oil paint.
The blues are always purer in water based media however.