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This is Happiness, by Niall Williams, is a gorgeously written book in a self-described Baroque style. Many reviewers have simply said, “this is happiness”, to read an author who weaves us into an intricately colourful […]
The goal of The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, by Alka Joshi, was clearly to provide a window into India’s complicated politics and culture. Though the novel provided a wealth of information about the area in […]
I am writing this review because I feel obliged to understand why I abandoned the The Keeper of Lost Things after the first couple of chapters. I usually try to plow through any book I […]
In her forward to The Gift by Lewis Hyde, Margaret Atwood says: “If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help keep you sane.” This is […]
For many years i have been an amateur, yet ardent, birdwatcher and this blog, Bird Watching: A Love Affair, describes how & why birds have formed an important theme in my artwork. Yesterday I spent […]
As an artist I depend on writers to put into words their thoughts on some of the issues that philosophers perennially grapple with: Good, Evil, Transcendence & The Divine. A work of art is sometimes […]
Now that I am once again living on an island, Island Time is a real phenomenon. It feels like there is more time but the priorities for how to use it have shifted. It is […]
Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers, poses the question – “is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” (excerpt from the novel, […]
I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes? For years I accepted the imperative that a serious artist must avoid sinking into prettiness. But […]
Now that I live in semi-rural area, I am relying more and more on books to provide the assurance that making art is relevant. My new home is one of natural beauty, is visually inspiring and […]
Authors often like to use painters as protagonists because they illustrate some of the issues and concerns that are relevant to all artists. Sometimes these works reflect the reality of life for most painters but […]
This blog describes Paintings I created between 2019 – 2021 that explored European Neolithic art and the culture of my ancient forebears. I am interested in this culture as it appears to have been focused […]
For some years, I have been thinking about issues of gender inequality and exploring the idea that gender inequality and gender violence have the same root as human violence against nature. In both cases, the […]
As discussed in other blogs, from 2019-2021, my work was inspired by European Neolithic images from thousands of years ago. In those blogs, I compared the societies that created European Neolithic art to contemporary Western […]
how has suspicion of any clear statement of goals, reference to any absolute principles and denial of any metaphysical basis for existence or thought become the dominant paradigm?
As further research into painting in the 21st Century, this blog looks at some modernist art criticism from the 1960’s & ’70’s. It briefly reviews how two major art critics of that era shaped current […]
This post continues the exploration of the philosophical currents that shape current art practices, in this case the issue of identity and Neo-Liberalism. A previous post, More on Painting, touched on the issue of identity, […]
This blog, Art, Activism & the Avant-Garde sets out to discover whether art has a meaningful role in the face of considerable global ecological, social, economic and cultural problems. Art as Counterbalance When the arts […]
This and other posts are an effort to understand how painting has become a suspect art form, freighted with assumptions of its strong & irredeemable connection to everything that was wrong with art before the […]