…. from the academic life, that is.  It seems perhaps not.  I opened my email this morning to find a message from a Spanish sociologist enquiring about an article I wrote back in (I think) the 1990s.  The piece is called Tourism as a sacred journey.  Since I left the university in 2001 I have … Read more

Did you ever play that children’s game that involves walking down the street without ever stepping on the cracks between the paving slabs?  If so, I bet you know the rhyme that goes with it: If you step on a nick You’ll marry a brick And bears will come to your wedding. I’m now trying … Read more

It is often said of one type of actors that they are people who have difficulty in permitting their inner selves to enter into public communication.  They get by through the device of adopting a succession of personae, the purpose of which is to conceal their inner selves behind masks.  (I suppose that Peter Sellers … Read more

I was watching a piece the other night about Georgia O’Keefe, and was struck by the fact that apparently she got rather upset when people suggested that there might be a psychoanalytic interpretation of her painting.  First of all, the fact that people looked at her work in this way should hardly be surprising in … Read more

A friend once told me that a “professional artist” is one who declares earnings from art to the income tax authorities.  I like that. It describes me. The word “professional”, however, normally carries other meanings.  It suggests a higher-status occupation, and in particular one in which intellectual rather than manual skills are pre-eminent. Here things … Read more

This is not the perennial problem of how much to ask for a piece of art-work, but the related question of how much should the client pay for an artist’s time and skill.  What is the going rate for a “professional artist”?  The question has arisen for me in trying to decide how much to … Read more

…. you can’t find everything you want on the internet!  I spent ages looking on the internet for photographs of British troops equipped for bomb disposal–in connection with my design for stained glass windows for the Defence Academy chapel in Shrivenham.  I turned up hundreds of photographs, but none of them were what I wanted. … Read more

Yesterday I got to grips (at last!) with the task of clearing out old files relating to my art work.  Auguste Comte used to advise “mental hygiene”: well, I’m practicing “artistic hygiene”.  The disposal of old, irrelevant documents has extended today into the disposal of old images.  It happened by accident.  I needed a portfolio … Read more

I’ve decided that this is what I’m doing at the moment.  At one time I thought that if I wasn’t actually painting I wasn’t “doing art”.  Now I have come to realise that it is possible to be processing material almost beneath the level of consciousness–perhaps even completely so. At the moment there is something … Read more

I’ve often asked myself that question, visiting galleries there when staying with family north of the border.  We were taken to the Kinblethmont Gallery (located in a rather grand country house, not far from Arbroath).  Although my response to the several artists currently on show there was very diverse, in each case I was glad … Read more