Art and Photos

Our pho­tos are hos­ted on Flickr

Slideshow:

Next! Basho’s favor­ite paint­ings. Click images for large versions:

Cesca 2005

This is my wife Cesca.  A few years ago she went to Africa for a month and I painted this to come to terms with miss­ing her so much.  We have it above the TV in the lounge.  This is Cesca when she was in Ams­ter­dam, the prior occa­sion we had been apart for a long time.  Strange fact: the time taken to paint this, includ­ing dry­ing time, was exactly the same amount of time it took to watch the movie Pred­ator, which I had on in the back­ground (I know the film so well now that I don’t actu­ally need to watch it!).  What I was going for was the hap­pi­ness I saw in the ori­ginal image, Cesca has a fant­astic smile when happy and here it is full flow.

Grandad

Grandad Bell.  After Grandad died I wanted to paint some­thing for my Grand­mother that would show how much I loved him.  Here it is.  Grandma has in hung in her lounge.  This is him in his clas­sic pose; sit­ting in his chair and enjoy­ing his paper.  This is how I remem­ber him.  I had not painted any­thing for 4 years before bash­ing this out first go.  No warm up, no prac­tice and no pause.  It took 4 hours and the end recip­i­ent was very happy.

Tabs

Tabs was a won­der­ful cat.  More human than cat really. Tabs was a fat, happy and peace­ful feline.  I had nursed Tabs using a moth­er­ing kit after his mother was knocked down and killed only a week after his birth.   10 years later he died.  My fam­ily felt the loss very hard and I wanted to paint some­thing to remem­ber him b.  This is my paint­ing of Tabs when he was young.  Again this was the first run at it and it took only 4 hours.  I remem­ber being unsure whether it would come together before I added to darker col­ours.  This brought the image into focus and made the 3d effect sud­denly pop into life.

This is a very bad image of the paint­ing as the ori­ginal is up on my moth­ers wall.

This is him pos­ing like only a cat can!

This next paint­ing of Tabs is him when he was younger and fit­ter than before, but this time not aware of my gaze.

This one is for me.

A Warawi Christmas

Back in the year 1999, I was poor.  Very poor.  I couldn’t even afford to give my mum a ‘proper’ present  at Christ­mas, so I painted her this. I hid it on the  top of the shelves in the front room and didn’t tell her about it until speak­ing with her over the phone on Christ­mas day.  Her reac­tion was fant­astic.  Not the best paint­ing of mine by any means, but one that is loved by the owner!

A-Level final pieces

Final pieces dur­ing A Level are hard.  Not in the way you might expect though.  Rather for me the dif­fi­culty comes in com­plet­ing too fast.  If I paint a water­col­our then I am done in 4 hours max.  If this is a 15 hour exam then I have to take a book!  This leads to the worst pos­sible situ­ation for a water­col­our artist; improv­ing.  The num­ber one, sil­ver plated rule in water­col­our is to WALK AWAY AND DON’T GO BACK!  Ser­i­ously.  Noth­ing will des­troy a fine paint­ing more than spend­ing too much time on it.These are my non water­col­our final pieces.  I cant stand my other ones.  You see, I learned the above rule through pain­ful experimentation.

This pas­tel rep­res­ents the pain­ful know­ledge of death that all beings hold.  It is about entropy and know­ing that we are all food for worms.  The bottle, you notice, doesn’t change.  This rep­res­ents the light of truth, which will one day go bey­ond the cycle of birth and death and empower us all.  This was, of course, from when we were study­ing dreams in art.

Teddy here is a still life, some­thing that we had to do reg­u­larly.  I drew him straight into neat using a darker set of pen­cils than in the past.

That skull makes another appear­ance in yet another still life.  Our teacher would set up the scene and we would all draw it over a couple of weeks.

This is the final piece that got me into my A Level.  You see I had not stud­ied a GCSE in art and the A Level was going to be denied to me.  My teach­ers struck a deal with me.  If I did the GCSE in one year and got an A, they would let me onto the A Level in year two and pass my GCSE work as my year one.  This paint­ing was my final piece on Lautrec and one of the very few oil based paint­ings I attemp­ted.  I got the A.

Cez­anne Work

Cez­anne was my study artist for my second year in A Level.  My mind was being woken up for impres­sion­ism and he was by far my favour­ite.   I learned everything I could about him and spent many hours get­ting into how he painted and, more import­antly, why.  I vis­ited all the gal­ler­ies I could to see as many real paint­ings of his as pos­sible.  I feel I even­tu­ally ‘got’ him but emo­tion­ally, I am light years behind.

Japan Brush Sets

One year Cesca received a Japan­ese art set from her aunt.  These are my play­ful attempts to paint with it.  This style of paint­ing is all about the ‘whitespace’ and I painted all these in about an hour total.

Any­way, If you liked the paint­ings, there are many more to be found (61 in total) at my Flickr page.

I con­tinue to paint when I can, and much more out­put will be com­ing this year, so keep watch­ing for more.

Regards,

Basho.