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“Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same.”  - Jeremy Goldberg To enter an art competition, I’d imagine that you’d need at least one or other of the above traits, ‘though I’ve notion that…

My new course on watercolours begins next week. Titled, ‘Watercolour Essentials,’ it’s going to cover all the things you really need to get started in the medium that not only intimidated Vincent Van Gogh and vexed John Singer Sargent, but…

At the life class on a dull day, a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the way the strong light from the work lamp obscured as much of the model’s body as it revealed. Although I’d reduced so…

The last six lessons of my online course, Watercolour A to Z, began with the letter U and that fundamental technique of art practise, the underpainting. In watercolour, there's no better exemplar of the technique than John Robert Cozens, an…

  ‘With an apple, I shall astonish Paris.’ Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) I received an email with a link to a Guardian article, the other day, entitled, ‘Nobody has ever been astonished by an apple’ – sorry Cézanne, but still lifes…

You may have heard of the Pitmen Painters. In 2007, Lee Hall’s play made them quite famous, both in the UK and across the Atlantic, but first, there was the book that inspired the play, written by William Feaver, a…

We're 10% of the way through 2023, but still feeling the chill of winter, of course, so I hope the bright red, above, warms you up a bit! It’s a detail from a painting by Barnett Newman, actually, titled Who’s…

Oskar Kokoschka, Polperro II (1938) Kokoschka's lively composition is loaded with juicy brushstrokes. Under his impetuous hand, the clouds race across the sky, trees sway in the breeze and the quayside bustles. When I was very young, we'd go on…

At the end of last year, I wrote a post about Diane Duyser, who made headlines when she saw the Virgin Mary looking back at her from her cheese toastie. She made a shrine for the holy toastie in the…