16 December 2007: A little lino print for Christmas. (The Joanna Thomas sculpture I got in exchange for the painting of Alice will follow shortly - I am still writing the page.)
18 November 2007: Another partly-finished portrait. People are so busy they can hardly make time to have themselves made immortal.
9 September 2007: Final version of the Alice painting: Alice in the forest where things have no names.
I am swapping it for a statuette of Misfortune from Italian Folk Tales by Italo Calvino. The statuette is being made for me by an American sculptor. Pictures to follow shortly.
23 June 2007: A painting of Sophie Germain, the famous mathematician, as a girl, getting up in the night to do mathematics despite having had her clothes confiscated.
15 April 2007: A portrait I completed last year, not previously shown on this site.
8 April 2007: Further modifications to the naked wood nymph in the Rococo manner.
7 March 2007: Both of my two new portraits are now on the site. There is now an improved photograph of this painting.
7 March 2007: Click on the thumbnail to see the portrait of Lynn.
31 January 2007: This web site is getting out of hand. I am creating a new section to put all my writing in, and I have added a link to the menu on the left. The new section will include poetry, stories, philosophical disquisitions presented in an entertaining manner, and diatribes. (Why does my spell checker not like the perfectly good word disquisition? Illiterate computers!) Anyway, as Mohammed Ali used to say, here's ma latest poem!
18 January 2007: A while ago in the mathematics section I gave a technique for brush cleaning with algebra. At any rate, I showed how to clean brushes with much smaller quantities of solvent. White (mineral) spirit and turpentine are harmful to the environment, and should never be tipped down the sink.
Not polluting the environment saves money on expensive plumber callouts, too.
Now GW of Alabama emails me with another way to reduce solvent use, so I have added his information and some of my own comments on it. more...
15 January 2007: Something not by me this time: a trompe l'oeil painting done for me.
20 December 2006: A Christmas and New Year picture and message.
6 December 2006: Inspired by the exhibition Velasquez, and in particular by Velasquez's painting of the Supper at Emmaus, I have written a poem. Who is that ordinary black girl, like someone you might see on the streets of London any day?
16 October 2006: The wood nymph is now finished, and has also been made into free desktop wallpaper.
Artists have to have an excuse to paint beauty, and mythological subjects provide such an excuse. Why there has to be a pretext is an interesting question, more...
14 October 2006: A new sketch illustrating my algebraic theory of child proportions.
I have now tested the mathematics pages and they appear to be printer-friendly, that is to say that when printed out, the menus and any advertisements not embedded in the main text do not appear in the printout, and neither do the complex backgrounds, thus saving ink. At least this works as far as I have tested it.
These pages may be used by mathematics teachers or anyone else interested, free of charge as long as the conditions stated at the foot of each page are adhered to.
12 October 2006: One of the flying fairies has been made into free desktop wallpaper. Notice the link to my desktop wallpaper page in the menu on the left.
4 October 2006: Someone told me there was a beautiful painting at the Tate Modern. This sounded both remarkable and improbable, so I went to see. I didn't find the painting, but instead a video art installation showing a nine-year-old girl reading from Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colourmore...
30 September 2006: I started a copy of the Triumph of Amphitrite by Sebastiano Ricci in 1997 and haven't managed to work on it for the past two years. I thought I'd post a picture of its present state anyway. I've also put a detail of Amphitrite cunningly concealed under the menu on the left.
30 September 2006: You will have noticed a few advertisements on this site. I shall try to keep them from interfering with the style of the site. Most of the Google ads are put there automatically by Google software, but I have deliberately decided to include an advertisement for the Firefox web browser because I have spent too many hours programming around the bugs in Internet Explorer 6, which turns the gentle art of making beautiful web pages into a nightmare battle. I understand that things are not likely to improve with IE7.
25 September 2006:South East London arts are featured in my new page of links to the quirky, obscure and fun things that you might not otherwise know about in South East London.
21 September 2006: The mathematics pages are now printer-friendly on Macs, and I hope on Windows machines as well. Also I think I have finally got round the horrid IE6 bug that prevented my backgrounds displaying properly. I cannot simply ignore the IE6 browser (which is non-standard and full of bugs) because most visitors to this site use IE6. Come on people, decent browsers are free! For example, Firefox or Netscape 8 or Opera 9 or almost any other browser. (As far as I know all browsers are fine on Macs, including IE5 for Mac.)
20 September 2006: Still no time to make new art, but I'm slowly making improvements to some of the mathematics pages, bringing them into line with the design of the rest of the site.
15 September 2006: A little potboiler about fractals. I've been busy, which is why not much has happened on this site lately.
20 July 2006: My friend Professor John Jones in Canada has discovered a previously unknown manuscript. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that having solved all the problems of philosophy there was nothing left to do except read detective novels. This discovery shows that Wittgenstein also wrote one.
24 June 2006: Unfortunately the link to Alexandria and her friends' electronic interpretations of my work now requires you to log in to see it: Avatars-n-Siggies.
28 May 2006: Someone called Alexandria from a web site called Avatars-n-Siggies asked for permission to use my artwork in making - er - avatars and siggies. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it's nice to be appreciated.
27 May 2006: New moon passing - extreme tides on the Thames, extreme thoughts sometimes. A friend told me that you know when you're depressed when you find yourself eating out of a saucepan. Never do this. Being depressed is like being a soldier in a hostile country: it is essential for morale to eat good fresh food and keep your shirts ironed and your boots polished.
26 May 2006: Someone is using one of my sketches on their web site (with permission). Thank you, Marcia, for the link-back!
23 April 2006: This is for St George's Day.
1 April 2006: I count myself a skeptic, not given to believing improbable things. But I find many skeptics do not go far enough: they stop questioning just when things start to get odd.
Here are two questions to think about:
Is consciousness a function of the brain?
Let us assume that each thought, memory, and sensual impression can be located somewhere in the brain, and that we have somehow worked out all the brain's mysterious connections and algorithms. How do those sensations and impressions reach consciousness? Are they all connected somehow to some particular location in the brain which is conscious (Descartes thought it was the pineal gland)? Even if they are, how does this explain anything? Wouldn't we just have reduced one mysterious black box (the brain) to another mysterious black box (the pineal, or whatever)?
What in physics corresponds to now?
Physics includes categories for space and time, and can measure them. It can even give a convincing explanation for why time goes only forwards even though space goes forwards and back and sideways and up and down. And why we cannot remember the future. But there is no equation, notion or explanation in physics for now. What, in physical terms, is now?
23 December 2005: A Happy Christmas and New Year to everyone. Here again is that lovely quotation:
I believe in the religion
Of love
Whatever direction its caravans may take,
For love is my religion and my faith.
- Ibn 'Arabi (11th century CE)
21 December 2005: Something I try not to do: a painting from a photograph.
19 November 2005: It seems that my fabulous desktop moonphase clock did not show up properly on my home page in IE6 for Windows. Now I think it is working.
This Flash animation tells you the phase of the moon as well as the time. If you want a free downloadable version, click on the sleeping moon-faced nymph on the right for more information.
6 October 2005:
A new sketch from the life model from my sketchbook page. There is no substitute for life drawing for getting a sense of line, space, proportion... everything.
29 September 2005:He who restricts the Reality to his own belief denies Him when manifested in other beliefs, affirming Him only when He is manifest in his own belief. He who does not restrict Him thus does not deny Him, but affirms His Reality in every formal transformation, worshipping Him in His infinite forms, since there is no limit to the forms in which He manifests Himself.
- Ibn 'Arabi (11th century CE)
15 September 2005:
Although this issue is now resolved as far as I am concerned, I thought readers might like to know of my strange experiences with the on-line money-transfer and payments organisation YowCow.
12 September 2005:
I thought my little painting a small incident in fairyland was finished, but then I saw things I wanted to change. A slightly revised version is available from my free desktop wallpaper page.
7 September 2005: update on the English apostrophe: a contender for the ultimate apostrophe catastrophe. Also information about the correct use of the apostrophe, with remarks by a correspondent on the formation of the genitive in Dutch, German and Middle English, and more on the correct spelling of St Thomas's Hospital. A rival link for the ultimate apostrophe catastrophe has been sent in by a reader.
20 July 2005:
The picture on the right links to a sonnet for children, called The Broken-Winged Fairy. It is a little bit sad.
7 July 2005:
I believe in the religion
Of love
Whatever direction its caravans may take,
For love is my religion and my faith.
- Ibn 'Arabi (11th century CE)
6 July 2005: My essay from 30 October 2004 Towards a new art is now in printer-friendly format. The text is unchanged, but owing to the wonders of CSS, when you print the page it comes out without the menu or background, thus saving your ink cartridge.
2 June 2005: free wallpaper. A page of links to selected large versions (height 768 pixels) of paintings and images from this web site. Drape your desktop with a naked nymph in the best possible taste.
29 May 2005: copy after Boucher. More rococo madness on an IKEA tea tray.
1 May 2005: Portrait. A departure from my child portraits.
More browser woes. When I checked I found that some of my newer pages don't work in Netscape 4. Life's too short to bother with this. Please, last remaining N4 users, upgrade!
21 April 2005. Experimental writing: Persephone's letter to Demeter. Persephone, a teenage goddess, runs off with an older man, and from hell writes a confused letter to her mother.
16 April 2005: My haiku page doesn't work in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. It works in Safari, Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac, Netscape 7.2 for Mac (Windows version not tested) and Firefox for Windows and Mac. Sadly Internet Explorer 6 for Windows is not standards-compliant. Download Firefox free instead.
15 April 2005: four haiku on love. I have used the unfinished image of the wood nymph as part of a new experimental layout, involving the illusion of transparency. (For those who like to know these things, the effect is generated without the use of gif images or javascript, just XHTML and CSS.) I don't know yet if this page will work correctly in Internet Explorer for Windows, which is a very naughty browser.
28 March 2005: Portrait of Roberta: a studio study (unfinished).
7 March 2005: The dress up doll flash animation is now ready, since she now has a petticoat. I could go on tinkering around with this and give her more outfits, but it is not bad as it is. Looking around the web, I think it is one of the most original dress up doll animations you will find.
The animation is like those cardboard ones you used to get on the backs of cereal packets a very long time ago. Unlike the cardboard ones you can change her age as well. This is probably unique on the web, until someone copies it.
25 February 2005: A link to this little lino print, inspired by Ancient Greek vase painting, has been added to the thumbnail on the prints page.
5 January 2005: A Portrait of Justine: an oil portrait on canvas board. My first painting of the New Year! I also have some other paintings completed late in 2004 which I shall post here shortly.
1 November 2004: I have made a new page for the painting of Nathalie entitled Queen of Hearts, and also put up a better photograph of the painting. There is a surprise page background too.
1 November 2004: A tiny painting of a female putto dressed as Athena.
4 October 2004: Here is my copy of a painting of a bacchante by Elisabeth Vigee le Brun. Click the image for more...
1 October 2004: A new scan of the lino print of the naked sleeping nymph. She is a nature spirit, a naiad. I have also given her a redesigned page.
27 September 2004: A new page from which to view my small collection of artist's prints.
9 June 2004: I shall keep this link to my page about the Transit of Venus because I have had interesting emails about this. A reader from Greece thinks that Theon of Smyrna in ancient Greece could have viewed the transit with a simple pinhole device, and another in the USA wants to circulate my page to his email list of university students.
8 May 2004: After much hard work, and five sittings from a patient client, I have completed and sold this reclining nude portrait. Click on the detail to see the whole painting.
6 May 2004:
A piece of calligraphy with a cartouche based on my Eros and Psyche design. A quotation from the Katha Upanishad.
29 April 2004:
A mermaid in the sketchbook section.
18 April 2004:
An oil sketch on paper of a cherub showing symbolic hints at the oil painter's secrets.
The sketch of a sleeping nymph turned into a little oil painting in the Rococo style. The image on the right is a detail. This link now leads to the full painting, and a larger version can be downloaded as free desktop wallpaper.
In my sketchbook section you will find an earlier stage, rather charming I think. I might have to do a shepherd as well some time, for all those of either sex who prefer shepherds to nymphs.
The aim of art is to produce beauty, and the aim of beauty is to remind us of greater and more real beauties, and all beauty comes from a higher world (as discussed by Plato in The Phaedrus). Thus there is no sin in art which is beautiful. Likewise, it is easy to distinguish art from pornography, since if it is ugly it is pornography, and if it is beautiful it is art.
New cool mathematical section. Click on the picture for the pages on human proportion: notes on the canon of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, a mathematical analysis of the proportions of children, and notes on the divine ratio.
Dionysos and a maenad - work in progress. I haven't updated this website for a while, because I have so many half finished things lying about. I thought I'd at least put up some further work on the maenad painting. Click on either picture to go to the updated maenad page.
Naomi at age 15, dressed as an exotic princess and wearing a head-dress she made herself. This painting was shortlisted for the Daily Mail 'Not the Turner Prize' and was exhibited at the Mall Galleries, June 7 - 14 2003. Click on the picture for the full painting.
A full size copy in oil on canvas of girl reading by Fragonard. The thumbnail image has been moved to the paintings page.
The painting of St Catherine of Siena as a young girl can still be seen via my paintings page. She is shown levitating upstairs. My version, very much a novel composition, was inspired by a peculiar nineteenth century painting in St Catherine's Convent, Siena.
23 April 2006: This is for St George's Day.
1 April 2006: I count myself a skeptic, not given to believing improbable things. But I find many skeptics do not go far enough: they stop questioning just when things start to get odd.
