Life-Drawing, February 2024
: “In my post last month about life-drawing I mentioned that the amount of oil used in the Faber-Castell Pitt sanguine pencil meant that I couldn’t get the tonal variation from it that I could from graphite…”
The Artist’s Notebook
(The return of the) Blogroll
Because it’s not all about me, but rather about building communities.
Last updated & checked for dead blogs: December 2023
Download the entire blogroll as an OPML file (also includes this blog) for importing into your feed reader.
- Flamed Fury - fLaMEd
- Bix Dot Blog - Bix Frankonis
- The Homebound Symphony - Dr Alan Jacobs
- Cold Albion - VI
- { feuilleton } - John Coulthart
- blissblog - Simon Reynolds
- Retromania - Simon Reynolds
- Criticismism II - Mark Sheerin
- De-Scribed - Scribe
- Enfolding.org - Phil Hine
- Escaping Flatland - Henrik Karlsson
- Going Medieval - Dr Eleanor Janega
- Orbific - James Burt
- Pluralistic - Cory Doctorow
- Room 207 Press - Howard David Ingram
- step one of a plan - Miranda Reinert
- Strange Flowers - James J. Conway
- The Daily Grail - The Daily Grail
- The M John Harrison blog - M. John Harrison
- The Old Weird Albion - Justin Hopper
- Velcro City Tourist Board - Paul Graham Raven
- visual/method/culture - Prof. Gillian Rose
- Gnosis Blog - Ellen Jane Rogers
- Recently - Kening Zhu
- Studio Diary - Dr Isabella Streffen
- Folk Horror Revival & Urban Wyrd Project - Folk Horror Revival
- Gothic Nature Journal - Gothic Nature Journal
- Open Graves, Open Minds - Dr Sam George
- Romancing the Gothic - Dr Sam Hirst
- The Wasted World - Dr Gregory Marks
- The Haunted Generation - Bob Fischer
- Modern Mythology - J. Curcio
- The Urban Prehistorian - Dr Kenny Brophy
- … an uncertain surface … - Stuart Mugridge
- A Year In The Country - Stephen Prince
- Sylvia Warren Writes - Sylvia Warren
- How The Mammal Should Behave - Natasha Kindred
- Ailish Sinclair - Ailish Sinclair
- Blackthorn & Stone - Romany Reagan
- Celluloid Wicker Man - Dr Adam Scovell
- ForestPunk - J. Simpson
- Revenant Journal - Revenant Journal
- Liminal Worlds - Rebecca Lambert
- Nearly Knowledgeable - Amy
- Psychogeographic Review - Bobby Seal
- Unofficial Britain - Gareth E. Rees
- Unquiet Things - S. Elizabeth
- Wyrd Britain ( Holloway) - Ian Holloway
- Richly Evocative - Matt Gilbert
- Wyrd Daze - Leigh Wright
- Xenogothic - Matt Colquhoun
- Tracy Durnell - Tracy Durnell
- Strange Attractor - Strange Attractor Press
- Temporal Boundary Press - Temporal Boundary Press
- Uneasy Writer - Andrea Harris
- Pays Fantôme - Pays Fantôme
- Roy Tang - Roy Tang
- An und für sich - Adam Kotsko
- Anarchist Writers - Anarchist Writers
- Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (podcast) - Margaret
- Rowan Tree Editing blog - Rowan Fortune
- catvincent.com returns - Cat Vincent
- Joan Westenberg - Joan Westenberg
A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming
Devil’s Dyke, Sussex - photograph by the author
: “In a post a few days ago I was writing about the importance of outgoing links as an integral — perhaps the integral — part of the web, and how social media sites seem to disfavour them because they…”
Read the rest of “A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming”…
The Journal of Psychick Albion
: “This is a quick blog post to let you all know that I have an article about my current Acid Renaissance series of artwork in the forthcoming issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (Volume…”
Think global, act localhost
View towards the Hope Valley, Derbyshire - photograph by the author
: “Links from one page to another are so fundamental to the web that without them it simply would not exist. HyperText — the H and the T in HTML — is defined by the W3C as text which contains links to…”
Life-drawing, January 2024
: “On Friday and Saturday I finally restarted the life-drawing thread of my artistic practice after a break since November. Rather than doing several drawings in each session as I have done before, I decided…”
About the web in 2024
: “A day may come, as Aragorn might have said, when I finally get back to blogging about my artistic practice — the entire raison d’être of this blog — but it is not this day. I don’t want to…”
My plans for 2024
Life-drawing from March 2023 by the author
: “I deliberately skipped the archetypal “round-up of 2023” blog post, I’m not entirely sure why. I think, for me personally, it makes more sense to talk about the year ahead. Writing about it helps…”
Acid Renaissance as we approach the end of 2023
Silbury Hill, Avebury - photograph by the author
: “A post by web developer Jeremy Keith (who, by coincidence, is also based in Brighton & Hove) came up in my RSS feeds today entitled After the end. I follow his blog/journal primarily for CSS and web…”
Read the rest of “Acid Renaissance as we approach the end of 2023”…
Blogrolls (reprise)
: “Last week I posted The return of the blogroll (and more), and — typically! — almost immediately afterwards I found out that many people have already been discussing blogrolls over the past few weeks,…”
The return of the blogroll (and more)
: “When I completely redesigned this site in September/October of this year I spent a lot of time thinking about this blog section - not just in terms of design and layout, but also about how it needed to…”
The Duellist
Previously unpublished shot of The Duellist, part of the Acid Renaissance series, by the author.
: “The Duellist — of which I’ve published two versions: The Duellist (1) and The Duellist (2) — has been hanging around the inside of my head for a few months now, maybe longer. As I was planning…”
Digital Worlds and Gardens
Photograph taken by the author.
: “Back in August I wrote about a lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism, and my deep-felt aversion to the call to adopt these trappings in the documentation…”
The stories we tell ourselves about the world are important
The characters C. Auguste Dupin and Roderick Usher in a still from The Fall of the House of Usher. Source: Netflix
: “This blog post contains spoilers for the 2023 TV series The Fall of the House of Usher and probably for season 1 of the 2022 TV series Andor. The recent TV series The Fall of the House of Usher is a…”
Read the rest of “The stories we tell ourselves about the world are important”…
Acid Renaissance and surrealism
Previously unpublished shot from the series Study of a Figure in the Court of Queen Mab, part of the Acid Renaissance series, by the author.
: “As I continue with the final preparation for my Saints & Martyrs artwork (which I wrote about back in August), most of my thoughts have been about surrealism. Lee Miller: Dressed is an exhibition of…”
Standalone but interconnected, independent but not isolated
Vauxhall Bridge over the river Thames, with Aquarius House, St George Wharf, London. Photograph by the author.
: “This is a bit of a ramble, but bear with me. One of the main things I’ve tried to do with this new website — aside from making it load faster and look better — is to lay the foundations for a…”
Read the rest of “Standalone but interconnected, independent but not isolated”…
New website (2023 edition)
Some of the code behind this new site
: “As you may have noticed (unless you’re reading this post in an RSS feed reader, more on which later) I’ve just re-launched this website with a brand new paint job. Actually it’s a bit more than…”
September life-drawing: not safe for whose work?
Three life-drawings from last weekend. Model’s pronouns: they/them.
: “I managed to fit in a life-drawing session this past weekend, three drawings from it are displayed above. As you can probably tell, I was unsure of the best medium or style to work in that day, but…”
Read the rest of “September life-drawing: not safe for whose work?”…
Planning for Saints & Martyrs
No assembly instructions supplied, alas
: “I’m currently planning an Acid Renaissance photographic piece — working title: Saints & Martyrs — which is heavily inspired by the “catacomb saints” so wonderfully recorded by Paul Koudounaris…”
On being a Serious Artist
My studio (which is also my living room)
: “A lot of online advice for artists is framed around the trappings of corporate capitalism: building your brand, hitting self-imposed targets, maximising sales through targeted marketing, and so on. If…”
Artwork from the previous month
Detail from one of my test photographs taken on Friday 28th July
: “July was starting to look very sparse of any artwork until, I’m happy to report, the final weekend. On the final Friday of the month I took some test photos for a half-formed idea for a future photographic…”