"But is is art?"

     For all practical purposes, I would suggest that we state that art is what is called art, regardless of medium or any qualitative aspects. To say that something is art does not give it any kind of stamp of approval, but merely describes it as an art object or action. The refusal to accept categories of art because they do not fully reflect a reactionary and conservative view of what art is, as if the category of art were eternal and unchanging, and not historical, is fairly absurd, quiet frankly, and it is a disgrace that this false dichotomy persists in the 21st century. And if I were to create something in a non-traditional medium, make it with every ounce of intelligence and passion, and it were denied the status of art, while, say, a lazy, vapid watercolour of a daisy or a cottage was accepted as art, I have to say something is very wrong.
     Photography would seem to remain contentious in this regard, as many photographs are made with no artistic intention whatsoever. Many are intended simply to record and do so effectively or not, and pretend to be nothing more than documentation. Some photography is undoubtedly great art and it would require a very blinkered person to deny this. (I think that the late Peter Fuller for instance would refuse it this label because a photograph was not made by hand, but he was steadily regressing into the mid-Victorian in both his aesthetics and his politics, and not the most progressive strand of that period either.)
     However, let me say that, by and large, I do not consider my own photographs to be art. This may seem a bit odd, after the previous paragraphs and a strong assertion of the status of art and even a cursory glance at my photographs will reveal that they are quiet different to images of Aunty Ethel at the seaside, so I think I need to state as well as I can what I mean by saying that they are not art.
Primarily, I see my own work as not being aesthetic in function, but documentary. What they document is the incursion of the poetic into the real of the real. That 'real' is frequently a very brute reality of things old and broken, scratched, piled up, left to rot and rust, changed by weathering or vandalism.
     The poetic aspect is the moment that the imagination opens up what might otherwise be nothing more than rubbish, becomes a visionary reinvention of the raw, brutal thing as something entirely other. I have not pretended to complete originality in this work and have named my influences, such as Emila Medkova and Vilem Reichmann, as well as contemporaries such as Roman Kubik and Bill Howe. Whether anybody prefers to call this documentation of poetic evidence 'art' is of little matter to me, all that matters is whether it enables them to see differently.

On the other hand...

   I can give an indicative, but not definitive, short list of favourite painters, in no particular order, that indicate my passion effectively.
   Toyen, Matta, Victor Brauner, Titian, Goya, Gericault, Botticelli (the early "pagan" works) Picasso, of course, and Matisse, Giacometti too, both as draughtsman and painter (quite apart from his sculpture, which is not under discussion at this moment). I love those pastels that Kitaj did from the mid-70s into the 80s and their effect on his painting when it was the most embodied, but had a sense of a ruptured and fragmentary reality. I fell in love with the work of Frank Auerbach at first glance, as it were, it was a revelation to me, although its effect on me had to be partly undone! Equally and opposite, for  awhile, the influence of Lucien Freud, especially his earlier works. Francis Bacon, definitely.
   Mikulas Medek, Eva Svankmajerova, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, I have not mentioned Rembrandt yet, although I do love his work, maybe it seemed just too much of  a cliche to say so?
   I'm now wondering what all these artists might have in common, apart from being highly rated by me. Many are surrealists, but some are at the opposite extreme to surrealism, many are earlier, and I could go on about renaissance artists that I love whose names don't arise at this moment because I am more fixated on the moderns. It might be more instructive to mention the artists I don't rate highly or am indifferent to, artists whose work I despise or feel a great antipathy to, even if I respect it for, oh, I don't know, art historical reasons. (Do I really give a damn about such things though?)
   Such a list really only starts to define the territory for me as I rethink my own work, on etiny step at a time.

"What's your favourite colour?"

   A curiously banal question to ask somebody intimately involved in colour, and unanswerable by most painters I suspect. If somebody has several children, do you ask them which one is their favourite? At the opposite extreme would you ask a chess player their favourite move? The moves exist, as I understand it, within a context of tactics and strategy, and responding to the other player's moves and perceived strategy.
   Even if I say my favourite colour is green - and why not? - there are how many greens? Not just the full range from near-yellow to near-blue, but greens modified by other colours, diluted with white - and that does not even begin to consider the contexts of that green, a particular hillside in early summer, the moss growing on a tree, a jumper worn by some beloved person. And this does not even begin to take into account the opposite side, the negative, of green, that might modify my slightly hypothetical passion for that colour, the green of putrescence for instance.
   But I think that at any moment I might have a preferred colour that might have a significance for me, to do with a passion or a lack within me at that moment, and, assuming I am making mostly subjective colour choices rather than descriptive ones, might emerge in my palette.

Surrealism

I should say that much of what I shall write emerges from my engagement with and study of, surrealism. If you know anything about surrealism, you'll know it is not a painting style or a school of painting, but something quite other. I am not dedicating this blog to surrealism, but as it is where I situate myself in so many ways, it is an important aspect of what and how I critique art.
I was a founder member of the London Surrealist Group which is, at the time of writing, pretty dormant, although that may change in the coming months. But here are a couple of links to the group, first of all it's blog:
https://londonsurrealistgroup.wordpress.com/
and slightly more current work, constituting the 3rd issue of our magazine Arcturus:
https://arcturusjournal.wordpress.com/

Okay, the name of this blog is ironic, you got that, right? I am not going to claim that there's some monolithic "true art of painting" to be revealed - this is the way to paint, this is what to paint - but there are, nevertheless, questions of truth and authenticity about the acts of painting and drawing that seem always to need answering.
So this blog is born out of my love of these wonderful processes of drawing and painting and my deeply felt need to reassess how I tackle these questions of what to draw, how to draw, why I draw...all emerging out of a hiatus, several years long, in which I scarcely touched pencil or paper, and much of my materials actually date from the 1990s because of this. So it is a rediscovery and a way of orienting myself through a shifting and changing cultural landscape. I want to comment on other people's work, from brief mentions of exhibitions and books to considered critiques,whole and lengthy blog posts.
Nor do I exclude non-traditional media and art-forms from this quest. The extraordinary fuss made some years back about "Britart" seemed to be oblivious of the fact that Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" was already close to 100 years old, and its centenary is already over. What does this passing of time mean? How does it change the status of a radical piece of a century ago? Equally, the attention paid to new, electronic, media is that anything more than a shift in medium? Is it anything more than massive postmodern hyperbole? Or does it really mean a massive shift in the status and meaning of the "work of art" - assuming we are really talking about works of art anyway - and what we mean by that.
More soon, but meanwhile, here's a picture: