A digital sketch created for a print. It features a stylised insect drawn from my imagination. The insect is drawn in a sketchy black and white style that is perhaps suggestive of images produced using traditional printmaking techniques such as woodcut, woodblock or linocut. It also reminds me of scraper board. The black sky makes me think that it’s a nocturnal insect of some kind. It also looks a bit like a tortoise for some reason, with perhaps a bit of rhinoceros thrown in.
Acrylic and gouache on paper, collage. 14x14cm. September 2020
An acrylic and gouache abstract painting composed of a square of brightly coloured stripes embedded within a smoke-like form in gouache. The coloured square is revealed through a hole in the paper on which the smoke is painted.
A geometrical acrylic abstract painting composed of two separate rectangular areas each with a stack of smaller coloured rectangles embedded within it. The rectangles in the upper area form a ladder while those in the lower area are more brightly coloured. The amount of white paper on which the shapes are placed is important, as the forms seem to float on the surface rather than the surface simply being the base onto which the image is painted.
Geometrical abstract acrylic painting – yellow square blue diagonal
Acrylic on paper 8.5×8.5cm on a 21x29cm sheet. July 2020
An acrylic minimalist geometric abstract of a yellow square on a black background, with a blue diagonal. The interior of the square is very dark grey, not black. The paint is high viscosity acrylic, so it has a slight texture. The edges of the forms in the painting are generally sharp due to the use of masking film. A very small amount of bleed under the film was allowed in places (by not pressing the film too firmly onto the paper) so that a few imperfections could occur, thus preventing the forms being too clinically precise.
Note: this work has coincidental similarities to House Taken by Rafael Gomezbarros.
My concept predates that of Gomezbarros, mine being originally conceived in the 1990s to accompany an article in the Guardian newspaper, while Gomezbarros’s work was created in the 2000’s (as far as I can tell).
A proposal for an artwork about ants as a super organism
Artist’s impression for a gallery installation. January 2020. Based on a work from 1990
A proposal or concept for an artwork showing ants crawling across an art gallery wall, with the ants grouping together and coalescing into the form of a single gigantic ant. The artwork depicts the concept of the superorganism, in which multiple individual organisms of the same species (in this case ants) interact by a process of synergy to give rise to a collective body that can operate in ways that the individuals can’t. The individual organisms within the superorganism usually display a degree of division of labour or specialisatoin of function, meaning that the individual organisms can’t survive for long on their own. Human civilisation is often defined as a form of superorganism, although this isn’t strictly accurate, as humans can survive alone.
The ants in the work may be two dimensional, such as in a mural, or three dimensional such as in a sculptural work.
Finger Cardboard cereal carton, acrylic gouache, finger. June 2020
A cardboard cereal carton of the type with an oval window in it to reveal the contents, painted with black acrylic gouache. A hand is placed inside the carton, with one finger protruding through the window. The photograph here has a strange unsettling quality partly due to the disconcerting suggestive appearance of the finger, which looks like a penis. If it had been a penis the image would have definitely been a piece of fetish art. The fact that it’s actually only a finger gives the image an uneasy air of dissonance. It’s meant to be quite humorous. Another unsettling element to the image is that the physical context of the components are quite hard to read. The black box is not on a surface, as it is on the end of the arm that the finger belongs to (mine). The background includes an open door The door handle is visible upper right, with the door frame to the immediate left of the box) and there is the edge of a chest of drawers at the extreme left.
A smoking globe. Planet Earth suffering the consequences of climate change or global warming.
The globe in the image is resting on the ground rather than floating in space. It may be a giant sculpture of the earth smouldering as a result of climate change. It also has the appearance of being some sort of crashed or abandoned man-made structure, as though the earth is an artificial artefact, which in many ways it is, and that this is the reason for its stricken state.
The globe is resting on the ground in a very large field. In the background is a row of trees. These trees give a hint towards the existence of nature and the natural world, however on a second look it may be noticed that the trees themselves are in a perfectly straight line and are all the same age and species – they are in fact part of a completely man-made landscape.
This is one of my many works dealing with environmental issues such as climate change and global warming.
A work from my series of abstract animations depicting radiating forms expanding outwards from a central point of emergence. The work is linked to my interest in the process of creation on a cosmic scale, such as the creation of the universe at the Big Bang or the expansion of a star or other celestial object.
A video still from the work
The work is ideally viewed on a large screen.
This work was exhibited in the London Group gallery, Waterloo, London in December 2019 and the Penwith Gallery, St Ives Cornwall in February 2020.
A hybrid painting/assemblage artwork composed of an abstract gouache painting behind a contemporary plastic gulley grid (outdoor drain cover). The painting and the grid are both symmetrical, resulting in a square symmetrical artwork.
The brightness of the colours of the gouache painting are visually heightened by the matt black lines of the grid, creating an effect that has some allusions to stained glass windows. The contrast between the elevating qualities of a stained glass window and the more utilitarian qualities of a drain cover are noteworthy.
A video about freedom and its opposite: limitation or confinement. Freedom is expressed by the unconfined wheeling and soaring flight of the crows. Limitation is symbolised by the inert, motionless statue of an angel around which the crows are flying. Pathos is a major ingredient of the work, because both the birds and the statue have wings, but only the birds can fly. The unconstrained flight of the birds only serves to emphasise the fact that the statue of the angel is rooted to the spot. The work is a comment on the desire of the creators of the statue (us) to have the power of natural flight, and their obvious inability to have it.
The statue is on Alexandra Palace in north London.
An earth-bound angel and flying birds – a photomontage based on the video above.
Visualisation of wall mounted sculpture or installation. September 2018
This visualisation is a development of my work in creating human heads from plastic milk bottles. The sculptural heads are vastly over-sized compared to the original plastic milk bottles. The size of the heads gives them an impressive air, similar to that created by, for example, Easter Island statues. The primitive markings that create the faces are reminiscent of ancient ritualistic statuary. These factors, the ancient and the impressive, give the work a tension due to the mundanity of the objects that are actually represented – discarded plastic milk bottles with fibre tip pen faces drawn on them. These heads are partly a comment on our throw-away consumer culture and the environmental hazard that it represents. The size of the milk bottles can be taken to represent the size of the problem of consumer waste, especially of one-use consumer waste (such as plastic milk bottles). The faces drawn on the bottles are partly a reference to the fact that it’s normal people who are generating the waste.
The work reflects my interest in art and the environment (I created my first environmental art in the early 1970s).
Milk bottle heads Plastic milk bottles, ink. September 2018
Plastic milk bottles with human heads drawn onto them. These heads are an example of art created from rubbish. Their recycled nature is partly an observation on our throw-away consumer culture. The bottles are surprisingly head-shaped, reminding me somewhat of various non-Western forms of sculpture. I particularly like the way that the milk bottle handles make very interesting and bizarre noses. I’m in the process of making several dozen of them, as their impact is increased as their numbers increase.
A maple leaf painted blue with red polka dots. The leaf had fallen from the tree in autumn. The inspiration for this work came partly from the fact that the leaves on the trees were changing colour in the autumn, prompting me to think of changing their colours in other ways. In previous years I’ve painted acorns and suchlike in unusual colours. Like a lot of my work, this work involved interacting with and responding to the natural environment. Unlike a lot of environmental art, my own environmenntal art often involves interventions of a deliberately unnatural nature, such as here where I’ve painted a perfectly nice autumn leaf in unnatural paint (acrylic) and in a design generated from human esthetics. This is partly to convey the way that we impose our tastes and our values on the natural world.
Abstract art based on circles, squares and rectangles. A major compositional feature of the image is the relatively random distribution of squares on one side contrasted with the very enclosed and restrained concentric distribution of the rings on the other side. This is a deliberate contrast between randomness and constraint. The fact that the squares all have their sides horizontal and vertical is a deliberate feature of compositional restraint imposed on the relatively randomly positioned squares. The rings are not perfect circles. This is partly to disrupt any preconception that they should be perfect circles, especially in an image that’s composed of basic geometric shapes. The use of squares and long thin rectangles is probably influenced in part by Mondrian and the de Stijl group.
The creature in this video isn’t a woodlouse, it’s a pill millipede, of the species glomeris marginata. It’s climbing up the outside of a door frame. I was struck by the way that the millipede seemed to be gliding along its course up the door frame as though hovering slightly above it, as its multitude of legs are concealed. I also like the armour plating, which, along with the hovering, makes the creature look like either a high tech machine or an alien. Or a hybrid of both. The feelers help too.
Part of a series of abstract minimalist paintings of black squares with a circle missing from a corner, in this case along with the part of the square that is separated from the main body of the square by the circle. This painting is a study of presence and absence. The black square has the quality of a solid, impactful entity while the white circle and top left corner give the impression of absence or negative space. In other images the black square itself conveys a quality of negative space, suggesting a black void in the centre of the image.
This is a mirror-based artwork that uses the concept of infinity mirrors (which is a phenomenon I first became aware of while I was a student of maths and physics in the early 1970s). The work consists of four mirrors forming the vertical walls of a cube, with the mirrored surfaces facing inwards. Each mirror reflects the mirror opposite it, including the reflections in that mirror, so the reflections build up to form infinite reflections (or, more accurately, multiple reflections, as the reflections gradually fade due to light loss). Where two mirrors meet in the cube’s corners each mirror reflects the other corner mirror, creating a different set of multiple reflections.
The design on the cube’s floor forms the abstract image below:
In each corner of the cube the abstract images are reflected in the mirrors to appear to form the word “OXO”. Each of these words “OXO” is then reflected infinite times in the other mirrors in the cube. This artwork is titled “OXO Cube”, as it’s just too good a title to ignore (The artwork is meant to contain an element of humour).
A low viewpoint looking into the mirror cube, as below, shows the infinity mirror effect at its best.
A study of reflections in a sphere. A steel ball placed on a sketch pad in the centre of a radiating vein-like pattern. The reflections in the sphere give the effect of an eye-like form. The work can be thought of as a study for a floor-based sculpture with a large steel sphere placed on a floor onto which the radiating vein-like lines are applied. It works very well at a small scale however, with the steel ball approximately the same size as a human eye. The intimate size of the small version makes this version quite unsettling, while a larger version would possibly be less unsettling but more visually intriguing (because the reflections in the ball wouldn’t invoke so precisely a human eye). The initial concept came to me while working on a different project involving a steel ball (but not reflections) on a sheet of paper. I noticed that the reflection of the white paper and the room on the ball gave the impression of the white of an eye and the iris of the eye.
A close-up of the steel sphere, showing the reflection from the sideThe sketch on the sketchpad, with the steel ball reflecting the pad and the room
