Something completely different..

Am trying to put this one on canvas at the moment, but am beginning to wonder whether it`s going to be an improvement. You never know, though and it`s worth a shot.It`s a fun experiment.

draadcula

Dutch word play

I like what you`ve done with the place

home improvement

The question now is that when you draw a doodle with the intent of

(possibly) translating it to the canvas, is it still a doodle or has it been promoted to a study? According to the oxford dictionary a doodle is `a drawing made absent-mindedly`, so maybe a doodle drawn with intent is, in fact, not a doodle at all?

A few months ago I began a doodle diary. A long-time compulsive doodler, the idea was to add a doodle-a-day in a cheap drawing pad (the type with ultra-thin, recycled, grey paper, not unlike cheap toilet paper of the sandpaper type) and, once the pad was full, to put a few of them on canvas and see whether it worked. The drawing pad is full of doodles and I`m about to start with the next stage. But first, here are some doodles.

A design for a card I did for friends announcing the arrival of their second child. The final, printed version is slightly different with a coloured band running round the edge of the card, but I rather like the elephant in a white setting. I enjoy doing these cards immensely because they are very personal to people and are (usually) sent out to announce a happy event. Also, I get to try out something different every time. It never gets boring.

One of a series I started on last year and want to get back to in time. There`s another one on this page (see below, right). These are groups of people posing together (as if for a camera), their bodies seem partly melded together, one dark mass, dressed similarly and faces indistinct/unrecognisable, but still they are somehow separate, looking at the camera/viewer and not each other. I want to convey the sense of being `alone in a crowd` or the basic `aloneness` or `separateness` of a person even when in the company of others, be they friends, family or strangers, a feeling/sense I have always assumed most people will recognise, albeit experienced differently by each of us. I may be completely wrong and this could be something peculiar to some and alien to others, I don`t really know, but I`m hoping I`ve managed to get this onto the canvas with more succes than I am having attempting to put it into words.

Why stop at the edge of the canvas?

Another collision course

One in a series of `collision course` paintings. A recurring theme in my work is movement. I try to bring a sense of movement, speed and/or strength to the work and hope the viewer feels it, rather than sees it.

Over a year ago I set up my blog, put a barebones profile on, stuck in a few photographs of some of my work and decided I`d get down to posting some text the day after. We`re now more than one year along, the pictures are still the same and here, finally, are the first few lines. For someone who didn`t grow up `online` this is a fairly big step to take, since ... what to write, really? I`m an artist and I draw and paint pictures and hope they do the talking for me and mostly they do. But now that a very good friend of mine has put a link to my blog on her very good blogspot (thanks Kim!), I can`t leave things empty, so now the plan is regular postings of work and maybe a few lines to go along with them when I think they`re needed.
So off goes the first posting of, hopefully, more to come.