I attended the opening on Friday evening of an exhibition at the South Square Centre, in Bradford, where this month’s exhibitor is Pat Belson, a long-term colleague associated with the Unit 9 Gallery there. I was really surprised to discover that Pat’s show consisted of works in felt, as I have known her previously as … Read more
I can’t decide whether that is a good idea or not.
Thinking about how to (re-)start a project, shelved to make space for the windows, it suddenly struck me that we often get hold of the wrong end of the stick with art. People often talk about art in terms of communication, with an emphasis on what the artist wants to communicate. I have found that … Read more
…. 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