‘Fancy a thrashing?’ are often the first words the family ask me in the morning. They are referring to Malefiz, a German board game. Gabriel Byrne in ‘In Treatment’ might wonder if this was a safe forum for us to play out competitive feelings. The boys like the teams to have names, and the ones [...]
In between arguments and stopping periodically for tea and toast we are working and talking about how to get across what the paintings are about. Matt thinks people will find it hard to see why the paintings aren’t nostalgia for a moment in the early twentieth century when painting was interested in science and colour [...]
It is 2.30 in the afternoon, and I am exhausted. I didn’t sleep at all well last night, and neither did Matt. He is a little tense. Throughout the night something would wake him and he would demand ‘ What are you doing? You’re blogging again. Stop blogging.’ I would reassure him that I wasn’t [...]
Yesterday I was talking about consciousness raising by torchlight. Today it’s light from a different point of view. It is difficult to convey the importance of light to an image. I don’t mean lighting, which is a wholly different matter, external to the thing itself. I mean the effect of apparent light from within — [...]
A problem has developed in the Biggs Collings household. Matt is jealous of my blog. Every time I go near my computer, which like anyone in the modern world, I do throughout the day, for a multitude of reasons, he says ‘Stop blogging. Our show is going to fail because of your blog. You are [...]
I was brought up on a farm, called Groves, in Peasmarsh. There was a well under the kitchen floor. The roof was thatched, and alive with bats at night. It was a poultry farm, given to my father by his parents, who were Irish emigres. The house was Elizabethan, with uneven latticed panes much thicker [...]
At the moment I am trying out a new assistant. It is certainly not because I want to replace Sandra, who I would be happy to work with forever. But Sandra is getting married, and she is going to be moving on. She reassures me she is not leaving immediately, but nine months or even [...]
Scientific Paintings is the title we have decided to give our show at FAS Contemporary. It is designed to emphasise the mathematical and rule based nature of painting. It is absolutely nothing to do with the paintings being made from triangles — Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow is also made of triangles, it is [...]
I am sure this is obvious to many of you, but perhaps not to everyone. I have spent the weekend teaching a course on Colour and Design. There are many aspects of the course, but I’m going to talk about one, as it is an approach to looking that can be taught. It might seem [...]
My 5 am start didn’t get me to York particularly early. There were a number of accidents on the A1, resulting in a diversion and a series of traffic jams . Miki Slingsby, my photographer, who is incidentally very congenial company and a man of infinite patience, set out considerably later and encountered no problems [...]