"Oh I was very Lucky, London 1944" - Priscilla Thornycroft

When in London last I went down to the Imperial War Museum because, as regulars here will know, war art speaks to me and their collection is the best as they did most of the commissioning. Not much is on display at the moment due to refurbishment but they do have a selection from their collection in an exhibition entitled "The Architecture of War"

A high proportion of the work was made by artists I had previously overlooked or never stumbled across (DIY art history education is good but sometimes it misses out important things). I don't really want to talk about the exhibition today - I'd rather highlight this painting.

Thornycroft spent chunks of the war wandering round London sketching. Not being having a permit, she could easily have ended up in hot water just for that as, not unreasonably, people drawing or photographing damage or even slightly military things were regarded with a lot of suspicion. This picture was a result of these wanderings. It was made in 1977 from memory. Thornycroft wrote to the Imperial War Museum in June this year to tell them a little more about the painting.

"The woman sitting on a chair in the rubble was near the southern end of the footbridge from Charing Cross Underground station... I had just run across the river and saw her sitting in the road drinking tea... all she said was: “Oh I was very lucky.” An old lady from over the road, with a teapot, explained: “She was in the basement when the bomb fell”..."

I really respond to the feel of this picture. There is a perkiness about the smiling lady despite the darkness of her eyes, her head wound, her grey pallor and the fact her hair is still in shock. There is a joy and a thankfulness about her and she strikes me as a counterpoint to the line from Full Metal Jacket: "The dead know only one thing. It is better to be alive." Never has a cup of tea tasted sweeter, or a wooden chair felt more comfortable.

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I've seen this weather somewhere before

I remember last year the Thames was rising violently at Christmas, and come Boxing Day it was sweeping boats away left, right and centre. Its not as extreme this year, but its high and its fast because we've just emerged from a week of outrageous rain. There is one big difference this year though: today I bought a pair of wellies, so I can jomp across the meadows no matter what - and that is a very good thing indeed because the willows take on the most glorious all winter and now I can get up close. Its a very different place in winter, it hardly looks like Southern England at all.

Too many and too few possibilities

Another trip to London, another batch of options. So very many choices, so very much confusion.

I made the mistake of trying Tate Modern again. I find it impossible to engage with the work there. I still can't work out whether it's the building, the curating and hanging or the work. The hanging certainly doesn't help - there is an either an ego competing with the artworks there or maybe the curators simply don't believe that the art is interesting or actually communicates anything so they feel a need to spoon feed the audience with connections between pieces, juxtapose things and place things at strange heights. The rooms are discordant and lacking in rhythm. It must be deliberate but it distracts from the art instead of enhancing it. I'll try again when they finish the extension - the crowds will be spread out a bit more and maybe the quality of light will be different but I'm not optimistic - in recent years there have been signs of curator's egos at Tate Britain too.

Of course, it could be their current emphasis on the surreal as I only really buy into two or three surrealists, or it could even be that I have lost almost all interest in most post pop art art history;-) There has been a strange stagnation towards the end of last century and the beginnings of this, in and around post-modernism. A pursuit of superficial sensation, a tendency towards decontextualisation and cultural imperialism, change for change's sake, celebrity, art as a commodity and brand, a lack of purpose and never-ending cynicism may mean that much blockbuster art, high art and museum art is truly of our time but it will not get me excited. There is a precedent for me taking this broad a swipe - in between the settling down at the end of the Renaissance and Turner's late works, there are only a handful of artists I would get out of bed for. I think I respond most to art which was made in a time of purposeful change - not the technical and compositional stagnation of the Academy and Salon eras, not the sensation chasing search for novelty of today. I will keep checking out contemporary art, and from time to time I will stumble across gems like Kara Walker, or the film I saw the other day - Waste Land - but mostly I'll either be turned away by its superficialness (search Washington Green) its lack of ambition (search Royal Academy Summer Show) or its cynicism. As a result, I'll keep wondering where the hell I fit in to it all!

By contrast, other cultures seem far richer than ours at the moment. Here is a spectacular piece of pottery from the British Museum.

"Large Feather Leaves Bowl" was made in 2013 by Hisono Hitomi in London. She is a Japanese potter, born in one of the traditional pot-making towns. It draws on a truly ancient tradition known as flame pots, and is made from a hand thrown pot which has then 1000 leaves/feathers attached. It is a truly breath taking piece which took six months to make.

The reason I've put it in this post is that perhaps it signposts a way forwards for me. I happen to have been looking at Japanese and Chinese literature as a potential source of work but more to the point I am currently in a fog - I have seen art which has literally changed a little bit of the world (seriously, watch Waste Land), I have seen difficult and engaging art, I have seen art very local to me so backwards and lacking in ambition it hurts, I have seen current high art, so impenetrable and cynical. It has left me in a strange place where I can do nothing because I want to do everything and where I genuinely don't see how I fit into the contemporary art scene and unsure that I want to. Maybe looking out of the tradition of Western art is my best hope. I am part of it so I can't step out of it completely, but I can call on notions and values from the rest of the world and I can retrace my steps back to before the point at which I think we went astray.

...

It occurs to me this blog has become a little monochrome lately, misty photos, graphite drawings, paintings of midnight, too much text and some subdued oils. So I prescribe a little Broadway Boogie Woogie!

'Nuff said!

Jack Simcock: Landscape

Following on from last week's weather I've been scouring the internet to see how painters have dealt with mist and I found this enigmatic affair. Simply titled "Landscape", the painting is on a panel just 13cm by 16cm. There's a real ambiguity about it, with it being impossible to say if the bands of colour are hills or walls or cloud banks. The painting is a simple progression of closely related colours over a far wider tonal range than you first realise and is less monochromatic than it first appears too. It takes supreme confidence in your own ability and judgement to release a painting this simple and with so little definition. When you see the second tranche of nocturnes I'm finishing off at the moment, you'll understand why I have a reaction to this painting.

Simcock only died last year and this is far from typical of his output. He is best known for brooding pictures of bleak cottages on bleak hillsides around Staffordshire and the village of Mow Cop, where he lived. This later piece is perhaps typical, with the cottages shown from below so they appear very exposed and with the colours pretending to be monochrome when in truth they are anything but.

The Celebrated American, Kara Walker, Negress.

A couple of weeks back I saw what I consider to be the finest free exhibition I have seen this year. I didn't write straight away though as it needed careful consideration. As a white English man I have to approach the exhibition with a delicacy that Kara Walker, a black American woman, has chosen to avoid. There are strong clues as to why this is in the full title of the exhibition: "We at Camden Arts Centre are Exceedingly Proud to Present an Exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress." If ever there were a loaded and evocative title it were this and it sets the tone for the whole show.

Walker appears to start from the premise that modern race relations, especially in America, have their origins in slavery and this history affects both how white people see black people and how black people see themselves. As such, she sees the importance of reclaiming slavery from the history books, removing the veneer of politeness that Hollywood, the passage of time and the reduction of slavery to a set of facts and figures has brought and making it alive, real and visceral again. To this end, the exhibition goes to some serious extremes. The Arts Centre describe it as explicit, I prefer to call it unflinching and from here on in this post will touch on some difficult things.

The first room sets the tone. Three walls are covered in cartoonish silhouettes, clearly recognisable as negroes (and I use the word with due consideration here) or whites, using over the top facial features and outfits to instantly distinguish the two races. By and large the figures on the left are slaves and the figures on the right are slavers and soldiers - although there are a few interlopers on each side. There is a great deal of interaction between the figures, especially at the border between the two races. Much of it is violent and the closer you look the less cartoonish it becomes. A soldier's gun explodes as he tries to shoot a black girl. A white Southern lady examines the decapitated head of a slave. A black man tries to tear the penis from a white soldier. Various body parts fly across the wall. Hands are forced inside of or emerge from other people. I had the distinct impression that a lot of the vignettes were based on specific stories but I neither knew them nor needed to. With or without knowledge, the vitality and complexity made the installation incredibly engaging. I couldn't help but think of Punch and Judy, the traditional English puppet show for children, which treads some of the same ground but without the racial element and to very different effect. In Punch and Judy, domestic battery is played for laughs but here that same stylisation and humour is used with a more serious intent.

On the fourth wall is one of the most powerful new drawings I have seen for many, many years. "Sketch for an American Comic Opera with 20th century Race Riots" is a huge, vigorous piece which at first glance is dominated by an old fashioned fat, white man in full evening dress and a vast pall of smoke. On examination though, the painting is a history of the USA through race relations and it may prove to be a foretelling as well. The bottom of the drawing is a writhing mass of black people, with reaching limbs and distorted faces. Some shelter from the smoke, but most are caught up in or protecting themselves from a cartoonish flow emanating from or sucking them into the white man's belly. This white man, casually chatting to a friend, has a negress at his feet and he is holding something in her mouth. She pathetically reaches towards him. Is he turning her into a walking stick? suckling  her? force feeding her? stabbing her? On such ambiguities the drawing hangs. Beside the white man, a woman with (in Walker's visual language) a black facial structure but pale skin sweeps up the writhing mass of blacks. Again, this begs questions - has she on some level become white? (a theme which is perhaps touched on elsewhere in the show) is she a ghost? or is she simply that way for reasons of design? The left of the drawing shows destruction in the aftermath of a unspecified race riot. There are striped, cartoon movement lines here, and much broken glass which is very star-like in places here. The flames and smoke come from this section and it is hard not to see it as a torn and burning Stars and Stripes. The smokes keeps drawing the eye back to the white man's belly and the writhing mass of black people caught up in its influence. I can't help but read the drawing as a proclamation that the history of Black America's woes is the story of White America's greed. Whether its a view one agrees with or not, there is no escaping the force with it is put across.

The other two rooms contain more drawings and an astonishing video of a shadow puppet play which - to warn any visitors - contains explicit recreations of sex, rape and murder. They draw on the historically difficult relationship between race, gender and power in brutal and unflinching ways - but I've already written too much for one day. Suffice to say, if you can get to Camden and if you can stomach the fact that the subject matter is treated without any of the layers of politeness that history uses to make it palatable, go and go with an open mind. I don't claim to know if she is right or not but if, as Walker appears to be saying, this is how America became one of the things that it is then it is important politically. Without a doubt, it is that rarest of things - an exhibition which is personal, beautiful, thought provoking, difficult, uncompromising and totally engaging so for me, that makes it hugely important artistically.

It runs until January 5 at the Camden Arts Centre.

Mist

It would appear to be winter already. Autumn was late and only really lasted a month or so. In fact it was so late I had to abandon my big autumn project which really depended on good timing. Anyway, as there was heavy mist, maybe even fog, yesterday I took my camera out for one last hurrah before it goes into retirement in the country with a friend - and I'm glad I did, although I'd have preferred it if it had been my first trip with the new one because I saw something truly remarkable.

At the moment, waiting under the mistletoe is very lonely, very cold and very damp ;)

On the opposite bank of the river at Ankerwycke some tree surgeons were doing a little maintenance after the recent storms. With the mist making everything simple it was a truly beautiful thing to watch. In fact, I might even use the word "cool" and that is something I do not do.

After felling one of the limbs, the surgeon was balancing on a branch to tidy up. It shows better if you click on the picture to enlarge it, but for a split second, with the safety rope from higher up the tree taught and his head bowed, it was as though a lynch mob had got him. This is near the top of my mind at the moment as I saw the stunning Kara Walker show at the Camden Arts Centre recently.

Anyway, thank you camera, its been fun. Enjoy your new home.

New Work: Cooper's Hill Coppice

Bet you thought I'd abandoned the project! It has been a long time coming, but here we have the next two instalments from the series, July and August. The reason for the delay is that I have been pushing the medium until it screams and begs for mercy which has led to a fair bit of failure. These two don't push the envelope in terms of carving but they do in terms of printing and the way I'm using paper.

The first one, July, involves four processes which range from princess-and-the-pea delicacy to barely controlled violence. The key to the process is changing the texture of the paper part of the way through printing. Finding a paper that did everything I wanted took 6 weeks and is the main reason for the delay.

The second one goes to the other extreme. When I was picking out the paper and I asked whether I'd get away with it for block printing, the look on the man from Atlantis' face was a picture. Why? I hear you ask. Well, the thickness of paper is measured in terms of weight. For context, watercolour paper typically ranges from 160-600 grams per square metre. Typical drawing paper will range from 100-200 gsm. Photocopy paper might be 80 gsm. Tissue paper is often around 20 gsm. The paper I have used is 9 gsm. It's a Japanese hemp based tissue and if you breathe heavily it floats away. The reason I wanted it was its transparency and smoothness. In this edition I have printed the green canopy, mucking about with the inks to give a hint of texture. I have then mounted it so it floats above a dark brown backing to give the rest of the colour. Perhaps it is a little too eerie for August, but it has so much atmosphere I didn't want to change it.

Open Arts Café

As you know, last week I went up to London to an arts evening I've been meaning to get to for a while. The Open Arts Café is hosted by the West London Synagogue near Marble Arch (although it is in no way a religious event and is open to anyone, not just Jews). The basic idea is that while there are many opportunities for musicians to meet musicians, visual artists to meet visual artists, writers to meet writers and so on, there are very few places in London where creators and performers of every kind can come together and feed off of each other. The other unusual aspect is that a lot of the work shown is still in various stages of development and feedback is encouraged. It's held on the last Thursday of most months and it turns out that it's well worth a visit - in fact its a thoroughly decent and thought-provoking night out for very little money. It's based around a very loose theme each time - last week it was "Secrets, Enigmas and Puzzles" - even if some of the acts had to shoehorn the theme in a little ;-)

The running order was varied. First up was Kirsten Irving, a poetess/publisher with a mesmerising voice, reading from an anthology of poems about computer games she'd published. Her response to Lemmings has actually stuck with me; its a long time since a poem wormed its way inside me. Then came John Conneely, an Irish singer songwriter with an unusual voice and as much of an interest in talking as singing - who'd have thought that of an Irishman... Next was the beginnings of a play, In the Surface of a Bubble. We only saw excerpts and it is only a week or two into its development but it is going somewhere interesting; it takes the use of masks to a level I personally haven't seen before, with each performer wearing several at once on different parts of their bodies to turn a troupe of 6 into a cast of dozens. Although it was still very rough round the edges, the performers believed so the audience believed. It was a proper lesson in the benefits of just going for it, if you're doing something don't hold back, be intense and you will carry people along with you.

At the interval, there were a couple of visual artists to look at; one of them, Lola de la Mata, is usually a dancer and designer. As a result she is interested in repetition and variation and her work is precise and clinical. She took a couple of puzzles - a Rubik's Cube and a cut up piece of perspex - and produced diagrams of different states they could exist in, using dance notation as a code to record them. The diagrams, to a non-dancer like myself, took on other characteristics with the perspex puzzle notation in particular strongly recalling Viking runes, another way of encoding information. The other artist was Samar F Zia, and the work she brought along was exploring a simple observation - that a pomegranate can stand in for elements of the human body, from the colour, texture and layered structure of the skin to the blood red cellular structure inside. She was combining this with an exploration of muslin as material through sculpture and painting - this allows her to develop a medical theme which emphasises the body-ness of the fruit. From a bald description like that there is no link to the theme but, when you see the work, on the one hand she treats the inside of the fruit as a secret she is revealing and on the other the finished work is enigmatic and its origins are not immediately obvious. It is building into an interesting body of work and I'll be curious to see how it develops.

After the interval we had Pete Yelding, building up a tune from a sample of Evening Standard sellers' calls using loops of a cello and a guitar - perhaps the most interesting act of the evening but not entirely making sense. It was beautiful, the development and origins of it were clear and recognisable but I didn't understand why the guitar melody he played over the top had a Caribbean lilt. Chase him round the internet though, he's well worth a listen. Then came Sanjay the Psychic, a slightly disarming act. Either it went wrong early on, or he lulls you into thinking he can't do it before being genuinely impressive at the end. In some respects he takes the Tommy Cooper approach where the showmanship is more important than the tricks, in others he takes the Penn & Teller approach where he makes no attempt to hide how he's doing things. Finally we had a little improvised jazz, and without meaning any disrespect to the players, that's all that needs to be said from my point of view. They could all play well enough, but I personally can't tell the difference between improvised jazz and self-indulgent showing off. Don't get me wrong, it was competent enough but really not for me and from the set-up I'm not convinced it truly was improvised.

In between, founder, organiser and MC Maya sang a little - think a female Tom Lehrer without the science!

All in all, it was a really, really good night with good people in attendance even if the audience was politer and less rowdy than I'd expected. Some acts were far more polished than others but it really has got me thinking about my own approach and whether going multi-disciplinary and collaborative would be a good thing or not. Conversations I had with people have let me work out what it is that's been missing from my work over the last year, and collaborations do seem like fun.

The next one is in January and is thoroughly recommended; if it can change my way of thinking it might be able to change yours!

http://www.openartscafe.com/

Pay Night, Rosyth, in Winter - Charles Pears

I'm still spending  far too much time rummaging around the "Your Paintings" website and as a result I'm stumbling across many artists who have previously passed me by. Today, I want to introduce you to Charles Pears. He was active during the first 50 years of the 20th century and was an illustrator, a marine artist and an official war artist.

The illustration aspect is important; a cleanliness and a graphic quality shines through all his work. He produced a lot of artwork for posters and its easy to see this way of working carrying into his more personal work.

I've picked out this painting because it is startling. It shows a crowd that is both made of individuals and a monolithic entity in its own right. The crowd has a gravity, a slow but inevitable and unstoppable movement as it heads towards the building. The building itself is perhaps more typical of Pears' work, with its simple yet detailed draftsmanship. The mobility of the crowd gives the building a permanence and the relationship between crowd and building is similar to that between sea and ship in his other work. The sky, roof and foreground are constructed from characteristically flat, clean colours.

It was made in 1918 and is about 130cm x 58cm and is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.

Now Showing: Christmas Art Fair

Roll Up! Roll Up!

The Harte & Garter Hotel is hosting an assortment of affordable art to solve all your gift dilemmas. This weekend from 10am - 5pm each day, almost in the shadow of Windsor Castle, a broad range of artists and craftspeople will be selling original, unique and beautiful pieces starting from £75 - yes that's right, just £75 - less than a ticket to see a West End show.

I'll be showing one from my skylines series, two Februaries which I haven't shown before, all of the Cooper's Hill linocuts to date including one so new it hasn't even made it onto my website yet (it'll go up today) and five pretty little oil sketches which again haven't even been shown online let alone in the real world. My prices this weekend range from £75 to £600.

So come on in, its warm and out of the crowds and you might just find a perfect and unique gift or a little treat for yourself.

This Thursday: Open Arts Café

There's an unusual event held about once a month near Marble Arch and its on again this week. The Open Arts Café is an evening which tries to bring together as many different art forms as possible under the banner of a loose theme which varies each month. As its founder points out, there are many opportunities for artists to meet artists, poets to meet poets and playwrights to meet playwrights, but London was sorely lacking a true melting pot where people from every discipline could come together. The result is the café, where work in all stages of development can be shown to interested people in a supportive atmosphere and feedback obtained early enough in a project's life for it to be useful.

Last month the theme was "Into Darkness" and we were talking about getting my nocturnes on display there but sadly it wasn't possible due to other commitments on my part. This month, the theme is "Secrets, Enigmas & Puzzles". Expect to see a poet, a musician, a dance troupe, two visual artists, a contemporary almost sample-based classical composer and a jazz trio whle the founder/hostesss/mc performs a few songs in between acts. The venue is a synagogue and it happens to fall on Channukah, so although the evening itself is normally not a religious thing there will be a chance to witness one of the rituals which in itself should be fascinating to see - I have never set foot in a synagogue before! Entry is on a "pay what you can" basis and I'm fully expecting it to be a little bizarre, a little thought provoking, possibly at times a little annoying but almost certainly a bit of a giggle. I like secrets, so I'm definitely getting there this month albeit as a member of the audience rather than a participant.

Margaret Parker - Midland Canal

I found this by chance whist wandering round the Your Paintings site - the archive on the BBC attempting to show every painting in public collections in the UK. I'm sorry to say I can find nothing about either the artist or the painting; there's a Margaret Parker in the States but judging by her exhibition dates and style I don't think its the same one. This painting, of the Midland Canal, is in the University of York and I think its magnificent. There are 5 more things by her on the same website. I'd be very grateful if anyone could tell me anything about her or point me in the direction of more of her work.

CRW Nevinson - Leaving the future behind

Futurism still thrills me and Nevinson was perhaps its greatest painter.

Born out of the mechanisation of Italy, very little compares to the aesthetic as a means of expressing the industrialised age. The Fascist politics associated with it are unacceptable to me, but that is not something to muse over now. In so far as it is possible to separate the images from the politics I intend to do so as Nevinson was a little apart from the rest, not least because he was in England, operating in a very different political environment from his Italian counterparts.

Futurism was founded by a poet, Marinetti, and extended to every aspect of Italian cultural life. I will point you to the assorted Futurist Manifestos so you can explore the scope. In the context of Nevinson, perhaps the key points from the original manifesto, published in Gazetta dell'Emilia almost exactly 104 years ago, are "we intend to sing the love of danger", "the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed", "No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece", "We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene" and "We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot". As the manifesto moves away from bullet points and back to rhetoric we come to a summation: "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice."

One particularly interesting aspect for me is the relationship of the movement to history. It was officially anti-history, decrying the past and making prophecies that the Futurists themselves would be torn down ten years hence. Yet if you didn't know this and simply tried to draw a family tree of visual style there are clear linguistic links all the way back to Uccello - compare how the girders here are arranged on diagonals to delineate space and movement in the same way the dogs are used in Hunt in the Forest.  The cranes and funnels have the same function as the trees and, blue sky apart, even the colours are related.

For me the most bewildering aspect of his work is that immediately after his brutalised war work, Nevinson could be found painting pastoral scenes and even gardens in a half futurist and half cubist style. In the 1980's you would assume it was a dose of post-modern irony, but being made in the 20's makes it far more intriguing. Was he painting using mannerisms from habit? Or did he deliberately take two contrary traditions (the English picturesque rural idyll and a painting language developed to explore violence, mechanisation and de-personalisation) and use the one to subvert the other? And if he was using one to subvert the other, which is the subverter and which the subverted? At first glance one would assume as a Futurist he was anti-tradition and trying to industrialise the scenes, but I get the impression from his work that, as with Nash and so many others, the First World War changed aspects of him beyond recognition. Maybe this is history and tradition mounting a counter-offensive. If so, after these equivocal initial skirmishes, tradition won. By the 1930's Nevinson was firmly in the British landscape tradition along with Nash, Sutherland, Ravilious et al, the fields with their hedgerows the only reminder of his previous angular aesthetic.

Coming soon: Christmas Art Fair, Windsor

I've finally had confirmation, I'm taking part in my first Art Fair.

It's at the Harte & Garter Hotel in Windsor which is very close to the castle and is on Saturday 30 November and Sunday 1 December from 10 to 5. It looks like there'll be 17 of us, so expect a wide range of styles, subjects and prices.

To be absolutely honest I'd prefer to be outside in the middle of the high street but at least this way I won't be telling you about a last minute cancellation due to the wind...

I'm expecting prices to start about £75 so there will be things well and truly within Christmas present money. £75 doesn't get much that is present-worthy these days - a good pair of jeans, a modest bottle of Chanel, a so-called "limited edition" Xbox game in presentation packaging. Even kids' toys can cost more than that. Nice things like jewellery and watches and weekends away and spa sessions and technology cost so much more. And yet, and yet, and yet, for the price of a massage at Champney's or a cigar and a bottle of whisky you can buy a unique thing, an original work of art which could give your loved ones pleasure every day for the rest of their life.

I haven't decided for sure what I'll take. I'm going through that process now but I will have a wintry theme including prints and oil paintings and, depending on my final selection, my prices will range from £75 to £400, £500 or £600. As an added bonus and to make your gift perfect, if you don't like a piece's frame, there will be plenty of time for me to replace it before Christmas too at no charge for a frame of equivalent value or at a well below the high street price for a more expensive one.

I hope to see you there.

Armistice Day: Otto Dix self-portraits

Whilst looking for paintings for yesterday and today, I was struck by the difference between the attitudes of the British and the Germans towards war art. In the UK in 1914, art was far less adventurous than the rest of Europe; the avant garde had not really leapt across the channel and yet the government, on entering the war, commissioned artists galore including the most modern we had. They were given relatively free reign and it seems to me that the challenges of depicting the war is what finally brought the new styles of art like cubism, futurism, surrealism and the rest to this country. In Germany by contrast there were already bold artists doing interesting things. Berlin may not have been Paris, but there was far more going on there than London. When it came to war art though, I have only been able to find one official German artist from the Great War, and he was as traditional as they come. It seems as though the power of art was ignored and that the Kaiser's government must have been just as aesthetically conservative as the Nazis were later on, when avant garde artists were shunned, shamed and chased into exile. Through the midst of this neglect and hostility from his government strode Otto Dix.

Dix served throughout the First World War and was decorated and, like so many others, deeply affected. If his work was sharp and cynical beforehand, it was doubly so afterwards. As an artist he was formally restless, trying many different styles and constantly evolving through his life and yet his subject - sharp, cynical observation of people and society - was constant through war and peace. Harsh is probably the best word.

With all this in mind, here we have two self portraits.

On the left, from early in his service and probably about the time Dix became an officer in charge of a machine gun, we have Self Portrait as Mars or Self Portrait as the God of War. On the right, painted after his release from a French POW came at the end of the Second World War, we have Self Portrait as a Prisoner of War. Put together they say more than words ever could; a journey from an angry young man just given the power to cause death on an industrial scale and affected who knows how (maybe even intoxicated by it at the beginning) to a weary, phlegmatic old man who looks as though he is no longer capable of feeling anything but fatigue. Individually they are hugely powerful pieces. Working together, they are a very human story of the path, effects and futility of war.

Remembrance Sunday: Stanley Spencer - Map Reading

Twentieth Century English war art has had a profound affect on me down the years. That inter-war generation of artists are the foundation of my aesthetic, and the inhuman and brutalised aspect of pictures of the Flanders front speaks to me. I don't think that's quite right for Remembrance Sunday though, so here is a picture where the humanity of the participants is still intact.

Here in Salonika, half a continent away from the mud which usually dominates British depictions of the war, a patrol rests amongst the flowers while their officer, on horseback, consults a map. One soldier feeds the the horse while others fettle their kit, doze or pick flowers and berries. The little moments of domesticity, the pauses, the menial chores were the things the soldiers lived for, the blessed relief of the ordinary and the quiet.

Spencer spent six years beginning in 1927 producing a whole suite of paintings of his memories of service in Macedonia and in hospitals for a chapel dedicated to the forgotten dead. The Sandham Memorial Chapel is at Burghclere near Newbury and the scenes are, as with much of Spencer's work, treading a line between the domestic and the religious and they avoid depicting the fighting itself. Many of the pieces are set in mess halls and hospitals. Spencer wanted to remember the people, not the war itself.

The chapel is being restored at the moment, so the paintings have come to London. "Heaven in a Hell of War" is at Somerset House until 26 January.

Tomorrow, Armistice Day itself, I will take you across the North Sea to Germany for very different but equally human reaction to the war.

New website

I've been busy! I have a new website. As my work has evolved the gallery in the old one just wasn't up to the job. You'll find:

• Bigger pictures
• Better for mobiles and big screens
• The beginnings of a bit of integration with social media

all wrapped up with some pretty typefaces - what did you expect? I'm an artist. It'll evolve a bit in the coming weeks with some more pictures and an extra page but I wanted it up and running.

I've tested as best I can, but I'd be really grateful if you'd let me know if it doesn't work on your machine. I'm also open to suggestions for a better tagline!

Return to Ankerwycke

I was going to post some paintings of fireworks today but almost everything I found was pretty lame. There's more to fireworks to colour and sunburst shapes - where are the movement and the energy and the violence and temperature and the gone-in-a-heartbeat qualities of them?

So anyway, I've been back to Ankerwycke to see what its like in autumn, so you'll have to  make do with that instead!

It still carries an overwhelming sense of strangeness. I know I'm not the only person to think this; people keep leaving things and placing things and rearranging fallen wood so I guess they not only know the strangeness but they like it and choose to add to it. I think I've worked something out about the place; it has the same effect on me as whisky. Whisky is one of very few things I won't drink, because it amplifies my moods. Ankerwycke has this same power; it can draw out my sadness or my curiosity or the simple pleasure I take in being or whatever else I'm feeling.

Letting Parliament burn with JMW Turner

I don't know how well known it is across the rest of the world, but this is the time of year when an Englishman's thoughts turn to anarchy and we either celebrate an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and all those who sail in her - most especially the King - or it's thwarting, according to taste and whether we're Protestant or Catholic. Take a bow, Guy Fawkes.

Anyway, one night in 1834 and not as anything to do with Bonfire Night, the Houses of Parliament did burn down. Like the last few years, it was a time when politicians were at worst reviled and best held in contempt so huge crowds gathered, getting in the way and cheering as bits collapsed.

Turner was based just up the road so he sallied forth. Some accounts say he gathered together some students, hired a boat and watched the proceedings from the Thames, others that he stuck to the opposite bank of the river. Either way he was drawing and taking notes all night long. That sketchbook lead to these watercolours which in turn lead to some highly finished oils. Apart from the subject, the interesting thing for me is just how far down the road to abstraction he was here, as the subject is just an excuse for new combinations of paint, light, colour and half-defined forms.

As far as I know pretty much all of this set of watercolours and the associated sketchbooks are in the Tate's collection, and there is usually a selection from it in the Clore wing of Tate Britain.

Jan Van Der Velde: The Sorceress

Since it's Halloween, here is a glorious engraving from 1626.

I found it on this page; you won't find a much better overview of art's depiction of witchcraft at a time when there was widespread belief in it. Thank you Dr Booth!

Van Gogh: Wheat Field in Rain

By now you've worked out I'm a big fan of weather so, since its raining a lot right now, I've been rummaging round rain paintings. Its seems like there are a few standard approaches which almost everyone takes these days. Some paint the world in really bright colours despite the fact that falling rain mutes everything. Some paint raindrops on the canvas and in front of the scene as if they are looking through a window. Some paint everything in dull colours and pick a person or object out in a primary colour. Some have everything fading to grey. Etc etc etc... Do an image search on google for "rain painting" and see what I mean. Artists' lack of invention, thought and sensitivity when painting this most unpredictable of weathers is soul destroying. Where is the delicacy of drizzle? Where is the violence of the squall? Where is the poetry of a half-obscured landscape?

So it was quite a relief to find this painting by Van Gogh. It is well observed, clever and well painted. This is one of the most colourful painters of his time and, as it was painted in 1889, it was painted about the same time as some of the sunflowers and bright cornfields and yet our Vincent has toned his palette right down and judged his colours with a delicacy befitting the subject.

The manner of the painting itself is intriguing. He has found a way to make the distant mountains all but disappear in the rain without simply blending them away. The trick he uses for this is just so simple and elegant - he uses the same colours as the sky but changes the texture slightly and then draws the outline of the skyline on top in a related colour. The intermediate hills use the same idea but the colour is halfway between the foreground and the sky. The foreground itself is noteworthy too. Van Gogh's distinctive brushwork is used for the field as it would normally be, but it is juxtaposed with a very small number of raindrops which are indicated as simply as they can be with light and dark slashes. By carefully judging the angles of the two sets of marks - the perspectival and textural wheat and the dynamic rain drops - Van Gogh has multiplied the impact of both to add light, space and energy.

The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Not this Sunday after all

The street gallery in Windsor has been called off due to a forecast of very strong wind. I'll be looking for an alternative or else joining in with the next one. As and when something is arranged, I'll post it on the blog.

This Sunday: Windsor Street Gallery

Come and meet me and other local artists this Sunday in Windsor. I'm doing my first art fair which should be fun. We're there all day at the top of Peascod Street, almost within the shadow of the castle itself.

I'll be taking linocuts, oil sketches and one of the skylines and I'll also take a couple of nocturnes to see what sort of a reaction they get. Prices will be reasonable.

Hope to see some of you there!

Right click and choose open in new window. It'll all be orange soon...

New Work: Nocturnes

Its time to call a temporary halt to my beautiful nightmare: considering the term nocturne's musical heritage perhaps I shall call it an interval.

I have loved making these, I think I could work on more for many months yet to come. They are strange - easy on the hands but incredibly difficult on the judgement. The hand and brush skills required are minimal but the everything else is demanding. When you are working within such a tiny tonal range then the way every mark catches the light, the sharpness or softness of every edge, the tiny differences in colour, the opacity and transparency of every glaze or impasto, the relative glossiness of each passage, the way the texture of the canvas is emphasised or disguised and a thousand other subtleties take on a disproportionate importance because they are the only way the space, the light and the looming quality of the landscape can be indicated. They are the hardest things I have done, and I am a better painter for having made them.

So far there are six. Two show the full moon in relation to the bushes that grow along the riverbank here, the square one barely shows the Thames itself reflecting back the inky sky. All of these three are dominated by the street lamps of either the M25 or Englefield Green which, although they are out of sight, are close enough to stain the sky near the horizon as if with a permanent, artificial sunset. The other three explore the impact of car headlights. In one they are blinding, in another they slash the world in half but at the same time help give form to it and in the third they are less dominant and give glimpses of the surrounding trees.

There are two larger ones yet to be started related to these, and three more which are just a gleam in my eye at this stage which will look at the way mist rises across the meadow. I'll freshen up with something else a little more autumnal before I make those though.

I know you must be sick of me bemoaning the difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting, especially given my tendency to build paintings from multiple layers of transparent paint, but never has it been truer than here. The plan is to show them in Guildford in January; coming and seeing them is the only way to understand the subtlety. I may put close-ups up here at some point to give you a chance, but I've gone on enough for one day!

Heads up: Paul Klee

Here we have a little bundle of joy from Paul Klee, to celebrate the opening of a major exhibition at Tate Modern today. At £16.50 I won't be attending, but I'll bet its fun. Klee famously said that drawing was taking a line for a walk and that sum up his work well. This painting may or may not be there, but it gives you a good idea of his work if its unfamiliar to you.

It runs through to March 2014.