• The Kick-About #79 ‘Sheila Hicks’

    Our last Kick-About was a celebration of three year’s worth of mucking about with materials, making, inventing, re-imagining and re-purposing. As a result, I suspect some of us have spaces in our homes beginning to pile high with ad-hoc accretions of creative stuff. In terms of scale, none of us may quite have reached the…

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  • Throwback Friday #148 Whitstable Harbour (2022)

    This abstract little number was taken one milky day at low tide in Whitstable in late winter 2022. The view is of under one of the quays that project out into the sea, the sun lighting the pillars and dazzling against the black waters underneath. It was a painter’s dream under there.

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  • Throwback Friday #147 Stone Pines, Rome (2018)

    Also known as umbrella pines or parasol pines, the proper name for these iconic Roman trees is Pinus pinea, photographed here in 2018, and looking like streamers of greenish smoke or low-lying clouds. Amazing things.

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  • The Kick-About / A Third Year Later

    This moment in my blogging year does remind me a bit of when I used to put all my beloved He-Man figures on display, so I could just sit back with a purring of pleasure, satisfied by the simple act of amassing stuff: or when VHS was a thing, running my fingertip across all the…

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  • The Kick-About #78 ‘156.536’

    Welcome to this anniversary edition of The Kick-About – a fortnightly creative challenge in which a loose community of artists make new works in a short time in response to a specific prompt. Gathered here, and in no particular order, are selections from one year’s worth of online exhibitions, with works inspired by a richly…

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  • Throwback Friday #146 Scooby Doo Doorway (2015)

    More spooky goings-on in the Old French House from 2015. ‘Let’s get outta here, Scoobs…’

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  • Throwback Friday #145 Field of Gold (2020)

    Despite my best efforts, these photographs taken from deep within a hillside field of rapeseed do not do proper justice to the sensorial experience of being surrounded by this furnace of the colour at sun set. You can quickly run out of synonyms for the colour yellow.

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  • Strange Synthetic Perfumes (2023)

    My imagination attached itself to these lines in part two of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (an excerpt of which being the prompt for The Kick-About No.77): ‘In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes / Unguent, powdered, or liquid’. I got this immediate mental impression of colour, specularity…

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  • The Kick-About #77 ‘The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne’

    We spent our last Kick-About together riffing on a surrealistic painting by Lucian Freud – a depiction of a strange artificial-seeming room filled with improbable objects and an air of unfinished business. Courtesy of an extract from part two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we’re this week occupants of another theatrical interior, as ripe…

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  • Throwback Friday #144 Oxeye Daisies (2020)

    Taken back in the early Summer of 2020, an astonishing expanse of oxeye daisies in an otherwise overlooked field, where both the light and the breeze produced lovely, impressionistic effects. A magical space.

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