Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists
Everyone who paints regularly knows that, on some level, painting means going willingly into the unknown.
To put it like that seems a little exciting. Romantic, even.
But uncertainty is anything but romantic.
It’s uncomfortable. It means constantly facing the spectre of failure, and sometimes living with it when it happens. Fear is not fun.
So why do we do it?
You’ve heard the advice plenty of times.
Draw every day. Just paint.
It would seem to make sense – except that it’s perfectly possible to do that and not get any better at all.
Every morning, I pile the kids into the car and we head off to school. Despite the chaos, I treasure this part of my day. I get to spend some time with my boys. They’re hilarious and they make me laugh, without fail, every morning.
I also get to drive through the breathtakingly beautiful countryside that we live in the heart of.
By far the most common worry I’ve heard so far from people on my Threads program is that they can’t run a blog because they don’t have anything to share.
I think you have something very compelling to share right now.
You just need to be strong enough to do it.
I’ve been working on this painting for five days now. At the beginning, I was feeling a mixture of excitement and anxiety, as I usually do. Excitement at what the picture could be, and anxiety that I won’t be able to get it there. When I’m working on a painting for more than a day,
We’re snowed in again and the power has gone. I’m looking out over a landscape made fresh by deep snow. A new year is here. And as always, with it comes the urge to make changes. Usually, we try to make big changes. Often, a few of them at once. Which, you know as well
I’m profoundly grateful to you. If you’re reading this, I want you to know that. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I’ve had a few wobbles in the last couple of years. Now I wake up every day to breathtakingly beautiful countryside and a happy family. And the thing is, I
At first, I was slightly disappointed that we’d arrived in Uley right at the end of Autumn. It was stunningly beautiful, but it was a transitory beauty that was already changing quickly into winter. The golden leaves were falling and the trees were a little more bare every day. It made me sad because we
I was sitting on the floor of a small home in Kolkata, northern India, where I’d be staying for the next three months. I had my tabla ready in front of me. I had no idea what to expect. Jayanta, my new tabla teacher, had just seated himself opposite me. He didn’t speak a word
Uley Bury, an iron age hill fort, behind Uley village 8:30 AM. We’re in the car, taking the kids to school. As we drive up the steep, narrow, twisty road out of the Uley valley and on to the edge of the Cotswolds escarpment I catch my breath at the natural splendour of this place,
