For art’s sake is essentially a personal journey of discovery, a scrapbook where I file my thoughts, feelings and contemplations on the reasons for and process of artmaking. I hope it will provide inspiration and encouragement to others on similar journeys.
With this painting, I’ve tried to explore the influence that words have in black-and-white thinking and to depict the mismatch between our thoughts and reality when we’re caught in this damaging thinking trap.
The sky is a perfect metaphor for the mind, and I decided to visualise this idea in photographs that capture the impermanence of the sky to reflect the impermanence of thoughts and feelings.
Of all the powerful words, one stands above the rest as the most toxic and destructive to our mental health. Should.
Language is uniquely human and has driven our success as a species, but it comes with a major drawback – the power of words to harm our mental health. With this project, I’m making words the subjects of images to explore the power that words have over us.
Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture
Piet Mondrian
I painted these figs, fresh from the tree in Greece, with acrylics, working fast as the paint dried in the heat.
I’ve been continuing my exploration of out-of-focus photography with architecture and not only created some images I really like but learnt some useful lessons for taking this project forward.
I recently spent some time photographing the petals of perished flowers, making sketch images to see what the light was doing and what kind of compositions worked.
we make because we are constantly trying to pull order from chaos
SeanTucker, The Meaning in the Making
Newly inspired, I took my camera into the streets for the first time with a new perspective, free to follow my own vision of creating visual design from the environment. Some of the images resonate with what I was trying to do, and that feels good because they were made with a clear intention in…
I’ve always liked street photography, but as I’ve thought more about what I’m trying to achieve with photographs – what my ‘creative vision’ is – I’ve been struggling to understand how street photography fits in. The thoughts of street photographer Sean Tucker have unlocked this conundrum for me.
Beginnings are hard. The first steps of a creative project are full of uncertainties and fear that can stop you from starting at all. In his latest book, David DuChemin attempts to crush these fears with a simple mantra: Start Ugly.
In the history of art, the ‘why’ has always come first. And if you want to make art, and keep making art, you need to know what your ‘why’ is.
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and … then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling – that is the activity of art
Leo Tolstoy
Based on a photo I took a while back, I started experimenting with the idea of photographing out of focus to create photographs that are just compositions of blended shapes and colours – a purely visual experience.
Life is a very visual experience for me, and art is more about the visual than conceptual. With this project, I’m aiming to bring together art and neuroscience to explore the visual experience of art.
The resolve to go ahead with my Cambridge Colleges project finally crystallised – several years after I did the initial drawing – during the COVID pandemic, so lockdowns have prevented me from visiting any colleges. However, among my photography portfolio, I have the above image of King’s Colllege, so I decided to make this the…
This drawing reminded me of how it felt to draw and create art and showed me that, despite several years without drawing anything, I could still do it. What I didn’t know at the time was that this drawing would be the beginning of a project.
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