Walking Art

Many of the paintings, sculptures and assemblages I have created over the years have relied on walking in some form or another. Plein air painting relies on walking and exploring to discover a view I want to paint. Also, many of my studio based paintings are worked up from preliminary sketches and studies made during walks. Moreover, walking is fundamental to collecting found objects and materials that inspire and are incorporated into mixed media and sculpture artworks.

However, partly due to the safety restrictions of Covid-19 and wanting to highlight the issues of our throw-away society, I decided to use a written journal and photos to document my walks and the litter I discovered. Initially, my intention was to use this documentation as inspiration to create new artworks such as, printed books, internet artworks, data art prints, installations, sculpture and mixed media paintings and assemblages: However, I soon realised the walks and journals are an artwork in their own right and a method I want to research further.

Past, Present and Future

Part of of my research is to map and plot the path of each walk and highlight what I discover through contextual study, text, video and photography. I see each plotted route as drawing, physically drawn with my feet, plotted digitally on Google Maps, and then reinterpreted into the physical world in the form of an installation or mixed media artwork.

Past, Present and Future - Second Take

A short walk skirting Anglesey Abbey, Lode. A lovely walk but look closer and I still found litter.

Click to explore the series walking artworks

Past, Present and Future - Nature's Lament

Documenting discarded litter along the Great Ouse at Stretham Ferry Marina.

Click to explore the series walking artworks

Converging Time

As an artist I am driven to document my experience of Covid 19, both negative and positive. To explore the human condition and a sustainable way of living both mentally and physically. The pleasure at seeing nature reclaiming the environment and of clean clear skies across the world. Countered, by the feeling of frustration and helplessness, as lockdown eased and so many people returned to a non-sustainable way of living.

Converging Time virtual journal

Launch Converging Time internet artwork

Converging Time printed journal

Object Identity - Beer Can Litter Journal

The litter journal documents the discarded beer and cider cans I have discovered across Cambridge. Ber cans that probably won't be recycled.

Object Identity internet art litter journal

About Object Identity artwork

Launch Object Identity Litter Journal

The Space I Inhabit

The Space I Inhabit is a multipart artwork documenting a series walks I made along a predefined route over a period of three months. My intention was to record and collect the nitrous oxide canisters found littering local paths and roads. The final artwork is split into three parts; a digital journal where I documented each walk with written observation an photographs, an endless mirrored landscape created using all of the canisters, and a printed journal.

Endless landscape using collected nitrous oxide canisters

The Space I Inhabit - Endless Landscape

About The Space I Inhabit collecting journal

The Space I Inhabit - Printed Journal

About The Space I Inhabit collecting journal

“One ends up with a landscape one has never seen before but it is presumably the landscape you were feeling as you started the painting.”

Sidney Nolan

“Unless we use a tool we do not truly understand it and we learn by using.”

Heidegger

“The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.”

Agamben

“...the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Duchamp

“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented [...] It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as “different.” ”

Peggy Phelan

“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented [...] It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as “different.” ”

Peggy Phelan

“When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.”

Fisher

“I’m interested in playing with different platforms that aren’t really supposed to be in art, or be the art.”

Amalia Ulman

“It is now not just important, but essential, that institutions stop marginalizing online or non-object-based practices.”

Cornell

“That we are supposed to take care to recycle has almost reached the level of a duty or moral law, and this moral law circulates in the way we symbolize acts of consumption.”

Campbell Jones

“Disease ecologists believe that if we continue on this pathway, this year’s pandemic will not be a one-off event.”

Attenborough

“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”

Attributed to Alexander Hamilton, cited by Mika Hunnula

“We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.”

David Hockney

“Like an apparition, something totally unforeseen, possibly lasting for just seconds, may spring from making a few brush strokes, establishing an area of truth which ‘might actually expand into a whole truth’.”

Frank Auerbach

“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

Claude Monet

“When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work... it's saying I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.”

David Hockney

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”

Camille Pissarro

“I think that you have to be a bit one track to be an artist...”

Joan Eardley

“Many of my best subjects have resulted from looking back on past journeys.”

Sidney Nolan

“I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.”

Van Gogh

“…Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting…”

Claude Monet

“Painters must speak through paint, not through words.”

Hans Hoffman

“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.”

David Hockney

“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.”

Henry Moore

“Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.”

Alfred Sisley

“All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.”

David Hockney

“Listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling. Be firm, be meek, but follow your own convictions. It is better to be nothing than an echo of other painters.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

“The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.”

Henry Moore

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

“Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.”

Camille Pissarro

“Everything you can imagine is real.”

Pablo Picasso

“Creativity takes courage.”

Henri Matisse

“Never lose the first impression which has moved you.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

“That is why, perhaps, all of us derive Pissarro. He had the good luck to be born in the West Indies, where he learned how to draw without a teacher. He told me all about it. In 1865 he was already cutting out black, bitumen, raw sienna and the ocher's. That's a fact. Never paint with anything but the three primary colours and their derivatives, he used to say me. Yes, he was the first Impressionist.”