Renaissance Painting Article

An article about the making of pigments and hues during the 15th Century.
Colours of the Earth - Renaissance Paints

Bless This Field - Umbria Landscape Art

Spring has arrived and everyone is out planting their tobacco, corn, grain or sunflowers in the fields around San Secondo. Chemical fertilizers, water fountains and long hours of sunshine are one thing but always best to air on the side of caution where farming is concerned, so ensure your crop by asking the big guy for some help too.


All along the fields are these simple but lovely crosses made by the farmers from cane and leaves. I really like the way they bring the landscape to life. Rural, ethnic, sculpture the academics would probably class them as.

The Umbrian Alphabet

Well if everyone else is using Google (other search engines are available) for their artworks I thought why not join the gang. So this is the Umbrian Alphabet, created by spotting letters in the landscape from the satelite images. As you can see Umbria is not called the "Green Heart of Italy" for nothing, with still 70% of its surface still forested.

Windows Notebook

I loved this piece, real live footage mixed in with animation and a typical Dutch sense of humour.

Click for Clip

Vintage car badge

I have been working on a site promoting Vintage cars from Uruguay and was asked to design a badge to fit the era and style. It was great fun researching all the different types of motifs used to promote these classic automobiles. Looking through them I came to the conclusion we have definately lost something in our modern logos, Designers just don't have the elegance these old badges convey. So these are my homage to a more classy era. In Uruguay a strange combination of political and ecconomic upheaval has left a massive collection of working vintage vehicles from the 1930's to the 1960's on the streets, many still running and in mint condition.

More Mini Series

Three more in the mini series of 70 x 90cm paintings, the first is one of the farms over the railway, behind our house. It's based on a drawing I did last year after they had rolled up the grain and left it to dry. The next two are from Caprese Michaelangelo, where the man himself was born. A lovely disused old farmhouse and an ancient church whose history goes back hundreds of years.

Art in a Tin: Upper Tiber Sketches

A series of Summer sketches for the masses to take home with them. They are just little 90cm x 70cm pen and watercolour paintings taken from drawings done on my travels. Art for your wallet, small enough to have a gallery in your back pocket. The Tate in a tin can. These are more pictures of La Preghiera just outside Calzolaro, its such a great place to draw, over its 800 year history there have been many rebuilds and you can see them all in the stonework.

10 Second Sketches

Lately I have taken to carrying my sketchpad around with me and drawing on the train as I travel through the countryside. As you can imagine you don't get much time to capture an image as the train speeds along. These are the best of the bunch but were fun to do.

St George's Church, Cardiff

This pen and ink sketch formed the original artwork for our wedding invitations, yes, surprisingly at St Georges Church, Cardiff. A lovely 700 year old church in the countryside. It's only a small building but lent itself nicely to our invited guests, only about 80 but it was packed to the rafters.

Fish sculpture

This was a fish I created while having a picnic at Nash Point in South Wales. It was put together from pieces of driftwood, washed up sections of old rusty metal and lots of stones, pebbles and rocks. Some of the items are quite big and it is about 6' long. Great fun to make and probably now just bits of rubbish along the shoreline once more.

Viola

Viola, is my 1969, bright purple VW Camper, she has served me well for a number of years now but her maintenance is proving too costly. This lino cut is another I found in my long lost folder of other things I hadn't looked at in a while and although the print is perhaps not quite up to scratch I do like the image.

I enjoy lino cutting, it's very relaxing, like peeling mushrooms or picking your toenails. Unless you are really good, you always end up with a playful, simplistic image, which for me is a change from the more tight arsed things I tend to produce.

Santes Dwynwen Day

25th January is St Dwynwen's Day in Wales, she is the patron saint of lovers. So in a romantic gesture to my wife I made a heart shaped sculpture from stones and pebbles on our patio. It measures about 4 foot square. Who said romance is dead hey.

Phoenix

A Pheonix logo I painted a couple of years ago for a company I worked for. Came across it again while looking through some old files on the computer, just like opening up an old chest of drawers to find some old sketch pads.