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Summer, 2009: a day trip to Shellness, on the Isle of Sheppey, noted around these parts for its nudist beach, but what I enjoyed about our visit was the beach’s silence and its strangeness. Another one of those end-of-days places with an atmosphere all of its own.
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A few evening’s back, we went out to Sheldwich to see the field known as Church Plantation, with its dazzling crop of echiums. We weren’t the only people drawn to the improbable spectacle of blue, pink and white flowers, with its thrumming of bees, a young couple parked up and staging photographs for their Instagram…
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A final set of painterly abstracts produced in response to the Kick-About No.32 and the expansive landscape paintings of American artist, Brian Rutenberg.
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Another quartet of Rutenberg-inspired abstract photographs, inspired by the Kick-About No.32. Once again, the images are the result of first fabricating and painting some cardboard maquettes, which were then used as ‘Lego bricks’ to produce the sorts of three-dimensional terrains suggested by Rutenberg’s panoramic painting, Low Dense
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A bit of good news re. the Kick-About-inspired short film, When I Was A Boy, I Collected Pebbles From The Beach; it has just made the official selection for the Nature & Culture – Poetry Film Festival 2021, which means it will be screened in Copenhagen on the 21st and 28th of November at Kulturhuset…
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What with the influence of the Kick-About No.32, things have been rather abstracted on here of late, so I was minded to share these twenty-eight year old paintings for today’s retrospective post. They date from the very first week of my Art Foundation course and we were challenged to draw a still life of bottles,…
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The Kick-About No.32 introduced me to the paintings of American artist, Brian Rutenberg and his loose, vibrant abstracts. What followed for me was an ongoing exploration of form and colour, starting with cardboard maquettes and ending with the production of a series of abstract compositions produced by photographing the maquettes. Different installations under different lighting…
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After the first big hit of colour, the next most immediate thing I got from Rutenberg’s painting (the prompt for The Kick-About No. 32) was its three-dimensionality, that strong sense of folded planes and faceting, as if we’re stood on the floor of some Technicoloured canyon, staring off into the distance, or more precariously, standing…
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This cruel-looking apparatus dates from my Art Foundation course back in 1993. I even remember the brief giving rise to it, or rather the typically nebulous phrase selected by our tutors to so inspire our creative exertions: ‘Information Gathering’. I must have been reading a bit of Edgar Allan Poe at the time, my imagination…
Red's Kingdom 