Same size and type of canvas as Namaste but different orientation
Sister Liz – Acrylic on box canvas – 1000mm x 1200mm
Sister Liz – a new acrylic painting 1000mm x 1200mm
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Namaste – a new acrylic painting 1200mm x 1000mm
My latest painting – finished today – it’s quite big. I love it – it makes me feel good when I look at it, there’s something spiritual about it I think.
Namaste – Acrylic on box canvas – 1200mm x 1000mm
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Dani Girl
Some Work in Progress
Dani Girl – Acrylic on Canvas – approx 8″ x 10″
There’s always a story.
I was sitting in the studio staring at the walls, feeling despondent. There was nothing there. No inspiration – no focus – no purpose. The universe was empty. All I had was some dregs of acrylic paint and 5 or 6 old failed canvases that had been painted in some form of pseudo-abstract meaningless squiggles and splodges.
In desperation I squeezed random bits of paint on the canvases and pushed them about with a brush until they each one was completely painted over in whatever colour emerged from the random scraps.
I left the studio for a couple of hours and distracted myself by eating, feeling even more miserable, and trying to catch up on some sleep. When I returned I picked up the same brush and the same dregs of paint and looked for some form. I chose one of the blanked out canvases and traced the shape of a head on the ridges of dried acrylic and found its features.
Thus Dani Girl emerged and the universe wasn’t empty any more.
Job done.
Update: the next day
Here’s the other 4 canvases
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Jackie and all her flaws
Writing this blog is very much like writing in a private diary and then putting it back into a drawer.
Anyway – here’s another painting that I dug up from the shed and revived
Jackie and all her flaws – Acrylic on Box Canvas – 12″ x 16″
Not sure why or what but here it is
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Another revived painting
Not sure of the size – around 12″ wide?
Tair Chwaer – Three Sisters. Oil on Canvas- revived from 2010 in 2018 approx 12″ x 9″
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New oil painting – What have I become?
What have I become? – Oil on Canvas 80cm x 60cm – Price: TBA
The first painting finished(?) in the new studio – actually painted over a painting done last year that never really worked – see below. I’ll get a better pic at some point – the colours on the actual painting are much more subtle than this photo suggests.
The Estuary – Oil on Canvas 80cm x 60cm
As you can see “What have I become” still has the DNA of “The Estuary” but I think it says much more.
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Whodunnit?
Whodunnit? You just might find out over the next two days.
Tomorrow and Saturday, June 1st & 2nd, Cardiff Central Library is the location for the Crime and Coffee festival, a very special gathering to celebrate Crime Writing.
Meet some award winning crime writers and find out what makes them tick, how they approach their work and where they get their inspiration from.
Full details here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cdfcrimefest
I am very pleased that I will be appearing at 1pm on Friday as part of a panel discussion with two other local authors Phil Rowlands and Evonne Wareham.
Details of the panel discussion here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/event/FHFHEJ
Come along and discover the gems that this unique collection of talent has to offer
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One week later – a kiss of light
A kiss of Light?Writing between the lines
Discovered this snippet in a ‘journal’ from 2 years ago
The other day I was reading something – or listening to someone on the radio – a writer who said that him/her/they write by hand in unlined notebooks because him/her/they don’t want anyone or anything to tell him/her/they, guide him/her/they where to write- i.e. between the lines.
Well Mr/Mrs/Ms/Mx ‘Rebel’ – ‘Free thinker’, whatever – you’re constrained/restrained by the page, by the pen, by the letters and words, by the language, by everything you’ve ever thought, felt or experienced in any other way – so shut the fuck up – if you don’t want to be constrained/restrained by the lines then fucking don’t be.
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Welsh Village at Night
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Crime and Coffee – Panel Discussion with local Cardiff authors
This should be interesting . . .
As part of the 2 day Crime and Coffee festival hosted by Cardiff Libraries I, along with two other local authors will be discussing our very differing approaches to Crime Writing.
My focus will be on my trilogy of stories featuring Detective Inspector Frank Lee, an ex punk New Age Traveller, who, to the dismay of his family and fellow travellers, became a copper to catch the ‘real bad guys’.
Bums, the first novel in the trilogy is already available. the second book, Beats, is due at the end of this year and the final in the trilogy, Bones, will be published in 2019.
Come along on Friday June 1st at 1pm to find out more about our unlikely police detective.
The other two authors on the panel are Evonne Wareham and Phil Rowlands, both are great writers with their own unique take on Crime Fiction
Here’s a link to more info about the panel discussion and the rest of the festival: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/event/FHFHEJ
Click here for more about Bums, Beats, Bones and DI Frank
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Mozaic May 15th and 18th 2018, Work in Progress
WORK IN PROGRESS
Let’s see how this turns out
Latest version Friday 18th May
Both
Side by Side
See next post about this painting
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Crime and Coffee at Cardiff Central Library
Coming up:
Friday June 1st and Saturday June 2nd 2018, Cardiff Central Library has organised this unique and very special event.
I’m very pleased that I was invited to take part and will be appearing as a panellist for the Friday lunchtime event at 1pm.
The Festival itself is spread over two very full days and features many amazing crime writers including two great local authors Evonne Wareham and Phil Rowlands who will be on the panel with me. We will be discussing our motivations and differing approaches to crime writing.
More about Evonne at: http://evonneonwednesday.blogspot.co.uk/
More about Phil at: http://www.philrowlandswriter.com/
More about the festival at: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cdfcrimefest
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perplexion of the unfinished mind et al
4 fresh oils on canvas 60cm x 50cm -Framed
Spring 2018
£250 each Contact me for availability
Tân Gwyllt I: AKA Perplexion of the unfinished mind
Tân Gwyllt II
Tân Gwyllt III
Tân Gwyllt IV
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Poems for competitions
Impact
Delivery
Reception
That’s how it comes
That’s how it goes
As if from a parallel world where:
You are a Goddess
And I am not your lover
But I am
I am!
### Continue reading
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about knowing everything
So now you’ve got to the point where you’ve had enough, done enough, know enough. You don’t need to learn any more about any thing. Well, maybe that’s pushing it a bit, that’s a bit too arrogant. You still learn at least one small lesson every day, you will always learn. But all the rest of it, well, you don’t need any of that any more – you don’t need anyone else telling you what you need either, or telling you what to do and how to behave, how to think. No! Fuck them.
You are who you are. You know everything. You know it all. You know as much as you need to know anyway. Note – how much ‘you’ need to know, not what ‘they’ think is how much you need to know. That’s what it’s all about really – you know everything.
Up to this point what has been written was written ‘before’. From now on what will be written will be written ‘after’. You don’t believe you know everything anymore. In fact you believe you know nothing, Take water for example, you know nothing about water, truth is no one does, not even the most scientific scientists. Electricity – that’s another one.
We live in a world which should not exist, it’s so improbable it’s impossible. You are impossible. Yet you are, you know that at least, you are, you do exist – whatever existence is.
Can it all be true? Can you know everything and know nothing at the same time?
Who knows!
(Shrugs)
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Lord Harry for the ZX Spectrum
One from the archives – a game I wrote for the Spectrum in 1983
Might do a T Shirt or a painting or both based on this
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about Ordinary Things
Everything is ordinary, birth, life, death, flying, swimming, running, climbing. That’s what this world is. You can take any one of those ordinary things and zoom in and you’ll find that the closer you get the more it fragments, the more complex it gets. Zoom in some more and you get lost in the endless billions of sub-atomic particles. I mean, did you know that there are like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in just one grain of sand?
Now you have to admit that’s ordinary. It doesn’t get much more ordinary than a grain of sand; there are plenty of them everywhere. Nothing is really ordinary, in the sense that it’s banal, run of the mill, ‘normal’ – even those attributes ascribed to things or concepts are in themselves infinitely complex and interesting. Take a word like banal. I mean, what does it mean? Where does it originate? What are the other words that come from the same roots? In what context is it best used? Where is it best avoided? Does it have to be negative?
Sorry, I have a tendency to repeat, repeat, the things I want to say, maybe I’m subconsciously trying to build up a rhythm – I don’t know. I’ve also got a tendency to end up at the ‘10,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in just one grain of sand’ thing when I get too analytical. But that’s OK really, because it’s ordinary. I mean even the most seemingly unaware human being, and I would probably extend this to all animals, has these kind of thoughts, even if not in the same word patterns; maybe they manifest as feelings, or emotions, or something that isn’t so easily defined as language is.
So the point is: All things are ordinary, but ordinary isn’t dull, or worthless, or unremarkable.
Ordinary is extraordinary.
Here’s a short video of something ordinary.
the river Taff from Fitzhamon Embankment in central Cardiff
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about the End of The Sixties
The Sixties are finally ending. The signs are everywhere. The characters that populate the sixties of our shared imagination are shuffling off their mortal coils faster than newly elected politicians shrugging off their promises. It won’t be long before finding a genuine sixties survivor will be almost as impossible as getting an honest Tory to open your village fete.
So, from our vantage point half a century in the future, what was it all really about? Well, it’s kind of defined my generation’s life, coloured it in at least. But did it really mean anything? Was there a cultural revolution? Did we achieve Sexual Liberation and Gender Equality? Did we Ban the Bomb and Make Love not War?
I don’t think we did any of the above, but did we at least stall the inexorable rise of capitalism? Nope, never got far with that either. But, the sixties were special, with the music, the art, the fashion, the technology, the social movements – weren’t they?
Maybe The Sixties was just an idea. Ideas are powerful, everything comes from ideas. I mean, the music, the art, the fashion . . . and all the rest of it, they all started with ideas and then they happened. But – so what? Nobody wears mini-skirts and hot pants now, nobody marches from Aldermaston to London demanding nuclear disarmament – yet the nuclear arms are still there, more than ever. The reasons to do all those things still exist.
So, what’s happened then? Maybe the sixties were about hope, and now we’ve given that up in this topsy-turvy post-Trump-election world. There are too many billionaires, there is more wealth concentrated in the pockets of a couple of percent of the population than all the rest of us combined. The sixties itself has been commercialised more than any other decade in history – it has become a product, a facsimile designed to mesmerise, and squeeze money from, naïve punters like you and me.
Now that The Sixties is finally expiring maybe it’s time to bury the last of its warriors or at least let them sink into the shadows in retirement homes. We need to get on with now – the future.
In the meantime if you can think of anything positive that’s stood the test of that half century then write it on a banner and parade it proudly around town – or maybe just make a jpeg out of it and stick it on Facebook – job done.
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An Ordinary Bloke writes about (not) being vegan
I’m just an ordinary bloke and I used to be a vegan. Is that a contradiction? Can you be a vegan and be ordinary? Can an ordinary bloke even be a vegan? What’s ordinary about being vegan?
Well, it used to be impossible to be thought of as being ordinary and a vegan at the same time. Everyone’s perception was that vegans were weird, far from ordinary, sub-ordinary if you like, not worthy of any respect or consideration.
But now, apart from the opinions of some knuckle-draggers in the comments sections of online newspapers and your auntie Betty, who still swears by steamed sheep’s brains on a bed of fried bull’s balls, being a vegan seems to have become accepted as quite an ordinary thing to do. So, that’s why I’m done with this vegan thing.
More than two decades ago I became a ‘vegan’ and long before that a vegetarian. Almost forty-seven years eschewing (not chewing) animal flesh, and you know what? I’ve had enough of it.
I don’t want to be a ‘vegan’ or even a vegetarian any more. I just want to be a normal human being who goes about their daily life without a big neon sign above their head declaring their foibles to the world.
It’s not just me. I was in Berlin recently and visited a small vegan supermarket. The company was all over the vegan grapevine a few years ago because they were opening, or planning to open, vegan supermarkets all over Germany and there was talk of them opening in the UK. At the time it seemed to herald the new golden age of veganism, at last there was enough of a market in providing for such a diet to make it commercially viable. Hooray!
Bu no, the guy in the vegan supermarket in Berlin said their plans to expand had fizzled out and their entry into the UK market never happened. Why? Was it because the vegan revolution itself fizzled out? Was the market smaller than they thought?
No, it was because regular supermarkets and shops started to stock the same ranges of specialised vegan products as they did. There is nothing unique about them anymore. Veganism has entered the mainstream, there’s unashamedly vegan options everywhere.
We may be a few years behind in the UK but it’s starting to happen here too.
So, I’m hanging up the label, I am no longer a vegan. I’m just an ordinary bloke eating an ordinary diet. I just don’t eat any animal products – but that is normal – right?
