blackfisharts ABOUT my art

Early Summer i went on a #getaway to Boat Harbour - spent 3 days there soaking up the sun, isolation and beach.  A nice visit from V and lunch at the restaurant was a highlight.  I treat all my #getaways as a 'residency' and go on long walks, photography and do drawings, writing and reading. the drawings en plein air shown in the earlier blog post led to these two little books. fine art photography of my time at Boat Harbour can be found  here a short video of a beach walk at Boat Harbour #Tasmania

                                                 I am so pleased to hear i am a finalist in this prestigious prize which will be exhibited in March 2025.  Once the exhibition is up I can post my work here. 

I am infatuated with 'place', a sense of place and our place within it and that art is a collision of the intellect and the visceral.  Abstraction excites me.  The struggle, in painting, continues to align concept/vision with ability, the technical aspects. This is why I work every day. The mornings are for computer work, admin, tidying (maybe), sorting, research and reading/writing. Working daily, on various projects and ideas I paint in the afternoons, across media including oil, acrylic, pastel and watermedia. Looking back on the last year, the struggle to abstraction continues. You can see abstractions in other artworks i do including artist books, asemic, prints, ipad drawings, photography and drawing.  1. search the label on this blog.  2. (check out the last 12 days of ' looking back' (label).

  Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 12 - chemigram. 2024 i discovered chemigrams and played (a lot) ... love what comes from process based art play. (wikipedia) Process. A chemigram is made by  painting with chemicals on photographic paper  and lies within the general domain of experimentation in the visual arts. It requires the use of materials from silver halide-based photography (light-sensitive paper, developer, and fixer), but it is not a photograph.

  Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 11 - artist books. I create books using photography, abstraction, altered books, books holding creative exercises, ICM, chemigrams and more on various projects. i also hold occasional (winter) workshops on creating artist books.

  Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 10 - IPAD i love using the ipad to create images - inspired by Hockney and Warhol and abstraction.

Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 7 -collage & stitching

Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 6 -asemic

Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 5 - drawing

  Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 3 - monoprinting

Dedicated to #13 ..so, New Year reflections - 13 days of looking back on 13 projects over the last year Day 1 - contour drawing

This was my second trip to Boat Harbour , an idyllic spot to regenerate and fill up my cup again. It is also a time to mark yet another birthday and take the opportunity to go on another #getaway for a few days. Vince came to visit which is unsual as he needs to be dragged away from home and his business.  We spent a lovely day of beach walks, lunch right on the beachfront and the afternoon was spent watching US elections for Trump take the Whitehouse for a second term. lunch at  Seekers Bar & Cafe   beautiful ocean, quaint book exchange & drawings en plein air For art photographs of my time at BOat Harbour go to fyneimages note to self: explore  further afield ,still close by, next time.

There is something about slow stitching - ie by hand and not sewing machine - that i love. it can be done anywhere, any time, while chatting with others, alone in silence at dawn or outside in the sunshine, in front of diversions like the TV etc. It can be meditative and as it grows slowly it can become satisfying. Musings on Found Poetry took me to thinking about collage and the slow stitching i do each evening - the pieces become a collage of cloth over time. Cloth is 'found', picked at random and added to with stitch and /or other cloth or even same cloth torn up and added to itself creating texture and a collage of elements. Examples here show what can be done with a minimal range of stitches that i use - that being straight stitch or a derivative of it such as couching, cross stitch, seed, backstitch, wrapped stitch and sometimes knot stitch. Often texture is created with stitch but also with layering of cloth, such as in these examples that include weaving strips into a...

  Is your passion a problem ? I am talking about your life's passion. It was a problem for me, for decades, while i worked in a career that paid the bills - but i always sought out 'that other thing' I felt I wanted to do. In my spare time and holidays I photographed, played with digital enhancements, did collage, calligraphy and wrote poetry. Sometimes with some success that was measured in being published and works purchased by private collectors. These days I am following my passion. I spend all day (and evenings) doing stuff - stuff i love - painting, collage, assemblage, photography, book making, slow stitching and writing. I am never bored, I quite like my boss, I enjoy going to work and I don't want to take days off or go out to gatherings, get togethers and coffee mornings. I feel so fortunate. What is your passion ? Do you do the things you love or are you in the process of re-discovering your passions. Perhaps we need to go back to our childhood to re-di...

 AI (artificial intelligence) is everywhere at the moment even in Tasmania. I am hearing and reading about it in art, science, literature, medicine. Wonderful playlist here on TED talks regarding AI and how it can be used in art including statistics and numbers as sculptures, patterns and moving visual feasts. A few of my own favourites from TED talks are listed at the bottom of this post. I enjoyed this article recently on AI stating the 17 best AI artworks created. I have been playing with AI on a website called Dalle2 that creates artworks out of the text you put into it. Initially I found it fun but quite quickly it then became un-rewarding for me and i wondered if it could work using my own art. So i took an image I had created on my Ipad from a photograph taken at Boat Harbour on a 4 day #getaway. Do let me know what you think and what your experience has been with AI. This is the original photograph taken at Boat Harbour , some year in May. This is what it looks l...