An old friend returns....

Sometimes you get to see old work that you have not seen for ages, and cringe to see how amateurish it looks compared to what you are doing now... in a way this is not all negative, as it at least indicates progress. On the other hand, some early works still resonate, for whatever reason, and it is like finding an old friend. This painting, one of my very early ones done around 2000, came back to me recently when my daughter moved and was unable to hang it in the new house, and it still speaks to me. Even though there is a lot I could do to improve it, I somehow think if I tried, something would get lost in the process, some naive quality that just highlights how I relished the backlit pink grass. That field is still one of my favourite spots to drive past on the N2 near Jeffries Bay, and I have enjoyed watching the line of trees in the background grow from the young saplings they were when this was painted, into an avenue of real trees now.



cows in pink grass  oil on canvas circa 2000

The aloe and cows in the painting were not in the original source photo, I added them from other pix, but when I took the photo below several years later, I deliberately positioned myself to include one of the aloes on the roadside, so that it would be in a similar position to that in the painting, a sort of reversal where a painting became source material for a photo rather than the other way around!


this pic of the field was taken several years after the original, in 2006, by then the trees were teenagers, but the pink grass was just as stunning, it is at its best in mid May and I always look forward to an opportunity to drive past at this time of the year.

A friend has just photographed the field this weekend, it is great to see that it is looking just as pretty, has not been ploughed up or had some hideous housing development plonked in the middle of it, the only difference is the line of trees which has matured some more. Thanks Caroline Morgan, nice to see this old friend again!



same field 2012



emerging from the shadows 4a and b

expressing concern for the current generation of youngsters in countries that have a recent history of civil rights abuse or violence, they will need nurture and guidance if the brutality they have seen is not to filter through society for generations to come.

emerging from the shadows 4a, 450x450mm oil on canvas

emerging from the shadows 4b 450x450mm oil on canvas

Across the Bay

I love the fact that a short stroll across the park in front of our home brings us to the edge of a cliff, and a sweeping panoramic view of Algoa Bay.....

across the bay   1000x1200mm    oil and metallic foil on canvas

Karoo National Park

Karoo National Park - charcoal on Fabriano - 430x620mm

Inspired by a recent trip to the Karoo, one of our favourite parts of South Africa. The harsh, arid beauty and distinctive mountains capped with layers of hard rock creating red ramparts of pillars are instantly recognisable to anyone who has been there.

drawing again

I recently wrote about the dilemma of wanting to work but still being sociable with family over weekends, and set up my drawing things in the dining room. This has proved a great hit (apart from the fact that guests now have to eat on their laps *evil grin.*) Whenever the mood takes me, it is so easy to do a drawing whilst chatting or listening to music together, and having everything ready and waiting has resulted in me being much more productive, as, even if I just have a small gap of time, I can just get stuck in and get on with it.

I am also simultaneously going through my photos and editing many, to print for sale at the Arts Festival, and it has been fun seeing them from a new perspective. Often what makes a good photo would not make a good painting, and taking a photo for its own merit requires a different type of vision than taking a photo as a reference for a painting. But I have found that, in editing some photos, converting them to punchy black and white images, they make great references for charcoal drawings! So I am re-thinking many of my gazillion photos, which were previously not that exciting, but when seen and treated differently they take on a new life. I'll show you an example....



this was just a somewhat messy snapshot of the new mosque near the spice bazaar in Istanbul, on a rainy evening last April (in fact, by coincidence I see it is exactly a year ago tomorrow!) I nearly deleted it because i had another better one of the mosque. Luckily i didn't, because when I was looking through them with my 'art photo eye' rather than my 'scenic photographers eye' I spotted the potential of the girls with the umbrellas and turned them into a black and white shot....



This in turn inspired me to do a charcoal drawing and a painting of the same scene...



Rainy Night in Istanbul charcoal on Fabriano 123x125mm

Rainy night in Istanbul oil on board 250x250mm

This process has happened with several previously rejected shots, and it has been wonderful exploring possibilities. Here are some of the resulting recent drawings.

Agave 1



baobab 5



baobab 6



baobab 7

baobab 8

forest road

Shadow Play

urban decay 1

urban decay 2

urban decay 3

urban decay 4

the ethics of source material and copying photos....

In my last post, I mentioned asking permission to paint a photograph, posted on facebook by a friend, and I thought I'd share my views on my approach, as an artist, to the copyright of others. Apart from the obvious "thou shalt not directly or exactly copy another person's image" copyright laws, and many artists seem to be abysmally ignorant of even these basics, there are no hard and fast rules, so it seems to be up to each artist to navigate their own conscience and come up with an approach they are comfortable with.

Having been involved in an art gallery for the last three years, which held many open exhibitions for artists ranging from beginners and Sunday painters, through serious part time painters to well known professionals, I was able to observe how this is applied in the local art scene. I had to laugh when, in one open exhibition, a flower painting which was an exact replica of a photo from an old National Geographic was submitted; the reason I knew it was that both myself and a friend had painted the same picture as an early training exercise. There is a certain old Standard Bank advert, featured widely in many magazines several years back, of an old wooden stairway seen through an arch... I have seen several copies of this submitted over the years, with no effort to change the smallest detail.

So it seems to me that the ethics of source material is a subject widely ignored or abused by many artists, and I especially blame many art teachers, who instruct their students to bring pictures from magazines to copy... without a thought for educating their students (or themselves) about the copyright issues of the photographers who took the original photos.

In the early stages of producing pieces that are nothing more than learning exercises with no expectation of selling them or showing them in public, this may be fine. But in my experience, this seems to be common practice even amongst those who have gone on to become competent painters concentrating on realism, and regularly exhibiting and selling their work. Anyone who is beyond the 'learning to copy' stage needs to give serious consideration to the ethical use of source material.

As a self taught artist, who then had some lessons with a couple of teachers along the way, I did my share of copying magazine photos before I even became aware of the copyright issues. (And, I might add, I was not informed by any of those early teachers about it.) However, in all good conscience, once I was aware, I felt it was important to establish a set of values to guide my approach to the gathering of source material.

It is evolving all the time, as access to both images and information on the internet grows, but this is what I have arrived at so far....

For me, if I intend to produce a reasonably faithful representation of an image, even if it has painterly touches or slight poetic licence, I either use photos I have taken myself, or ask permission from the photographer. If, however, I am making an entirely original image from a combination of sources, and just need a reference to get a shape accurate, I have no problem with refering to photo on a public source. I have also printed poor "fast draft" copies of photos from the internet, and incorporated cut out portions of them into a collage, but always in such a way that they no longer resemble the original image.

I also draw a line between using images which are more or less straightforward shots of a scene or object, which would have been accessable to anyone else standing there at the same time and place... and those which, in their own right, have been created as artworks by the photographer, using their own distict vision, style, distortion, setup. I feel that, to reproduce such a photo, would be plagiarism, while to use the former as a reference within an image, containing more than just the info on the photo, would be ok.

What many artists seem to assume is that publication of a photo in a magazine or online grants tacit copying rights. This is absolutely not the case, just because it is in the public domain, the original photographer does not relinquish their copyright on the image. I think any of us who regularly posts images on the internet does so with a desire to share and a realisation that the image might be used. I love it if people enjoy my images, and gladly agree when people ask me if they can paint one. It is a matter of courtesy.

For me, where it becomes ABuse, is when it is copied, as is, and used in a way that implies it is the original work of the person using it, with no acknowledgement to the original person who saw and captured the image. The photographer in me finds this very annoying. I even recently 'unfriended' someone on facebook because he makes a habit of stealing other peoples images and presenting them as his own. (Lol, normally I wouldn't be intolerant enought to act on that alone, but this guy even gets out of his car in a friend's Game Reserve, gets his kids to photograph him with the wildlife behind him, and posts it in his facebook albums, bragging about his 'farm in Africa'. When he posted a famous image by one of the Bang Bang Club photographers taken before the democratic elections in 1994, of someone burning to death in a 'necklacing' incident, implying that he had taken it recently and putting himself in great danger photographing the violence which is "getting worse by the day" it was the last straw for me.)

But sick loonies aside, with the proliferation of easily copied images on the internet, and easy 'share' buttons on facebook, I guess this is an issue to which we all need to give some consideration... do we acknowledge the original source or carelessly and sometimes unwittingly 'steal' images to share with our friends?

new works in various media....

Hi, I have been so loving having more time to be in the studio lately, and while there are still many interruptions, I am getting a lot done whenever I am able to spend a while there.


I have been enjoying using different techniques to express the mood in each picture, so they are an ecclectic mix of faily standard oil painting, some mixtures of paint and charcoal drawing on canvas, and some very transparent layers of glaze coats and wet into wet on smooth boards, which gives a deliciously seductive result. And the the small charcoal drawings are ongoing too.


One thing I have not featured on this blog yet is my photography, but it is another medium I am busy with, and I am delighted with some large prints I have had done this week, ranging from A4 to a gi-normous A0. I'll show some of those pics in another post, but seeing them small on the computer screen really does not do them justice, they have such a presence in the big prints.

testing the waters 100x800mm oil on canvas

This is the daughter of a friend of mine... and I found their holiday photo of her dipping her toe tentatively into the water very touching, so I asked permission to paint it. It seems to me to be about so much more than a physical testing of temperature... it recalls all the insecurities of adolescence, being on the brink of the adult world, with all its possibilities and attractions, but also dangers and fears. Wanting to jump in, but being so very unsure of what one will find, or how one will be received.

New Mosque Istanbul 250x250 oil on board

Istanbul, it features in my thoughts, longings, reading and painting.... what a magical, mystical, contradictory and altogether enchanting place!

strolling in the rain, 250x250mm oil on board

Galata tower, Istanbul 250x250 oil on board

Rainy night in Istanbul 250x250mm oil on board

Rainy night in Istanbul 2 250x250mm oil on board

Be my Shelter 1000x800mm charcoal and oil on canvas

lifeblood charcoal on Fabriano 230x240mm

rainy night in Istanbul  230x240mm charcoal on Fabriano