Brett’s #2 (2023)

A few more photographs of the Brett’s aggregate factory, Whitstable, taken in response to the Charles Sheeler prompt for The Kick-About No.80.

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.

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.

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.

Short film: Tuinvolk (2023)

This week, The Kick-About No.75 had Hieronymus Bosch’s deliciously abstruse painting, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, as its prompt, and I was prompted to produce a little maquette in homage to the strange pink architecture in Bosch’s landscape and likewise his swarms of small pink people.

Having made my little ball of Bosch, I got thinking about raves in woodlands and the likes of the Glastonbury music festival, and I was reminded of a bit of footage I once saw online of an alfresco raver dancing away in the dawning light – even though the music had long since stopped and everyone else was heading home. I thought about Bosch’s garden revellers and how, exhausted from their various exertions, and stoned on strawberry pips and pectin, they might commune nonetheless with the sunrise. By way of a response, I made this little film quickly and simply, with Tuinvolk being Dutch for ‘Garden Folk’

Throwback Friday #138 ‘Centaurea’

More old-school 35mm flower photographs from the early 2000s or thereabouts, celebrating the gorgeous blues, pinks and purples of centaureas, and here, served two ways: the first being an image of the field cornflower, Centaurea cyanus, and the second, Centaurea montana, or perennial cornflower. Both press my buttons and produce an impatience in my January bones for a lovely blast of heat.

Throwback Friday #130 Scarecrow (2009)

A spooky little something as we near the end of October, as, Nosferatu-like, I appear to be dissipating into the dying of the light over a wintery beach…

Exquisite Corpses #2 (2022)

A second set of ‘exquisite corpses’ from my accidental insect necropolis, inspired by Père Lachaise cemetery, the prompt for The Kick-About No.65.

Exquisite Corpses #1 (2022)

Our kitchen has an angled glass roof running the length of our side-return. Internally, it’s constructed so there is a narrow ledge at the top of the wall, on which the glass panels rest, producing a series of impossible-to-clean compartments. These same compartments are where too many be-winged things go to die during the summer months, as they first fly into the kitchen and then up towards the glass roof in a fateful bid for freedom. We rescue as many as we can, but not every butterfly and bumble bee is as lucky. So it is we have something of an insect necropolis this short distance above our breakfast table, and while it’s true I pressed their exquisite remains into the chalky embrace of some filler for the occasion of The Kick-About No.65, no living bee or butterfly was harmed in the process.

Glove #1 (2022)

When it comes to meeting the fortnightly creative challenge of The Kick-About, needs must, and so it was I fabricated my own much down-sized ‘soundsuit’ from a single yellow glove, wooden buttons, glass eye pieces and strands of colourful wool. I was drawn to some of the goofier, ‘Jim Henson-esque’ elements of some of Nick Cave’s soundsuits (the prompt for our latest Kick-About) – hence the Muppet-y character of my resulting hand-puppet. Turns out, however, even the goofiest glove puppet can throw some shapes on the dancefloor!