Store

Art

Ever since being knee-high to a pencil, I have always used the aforementioned implement......smile…in its various gradations, from the ubiquitous HB to 3B to 6B, delighting in the subtle depths of delicate shading and blending. Of course, I didn’t know that when I was a kid, but just how great it was to be able to draw! I also messed about with paint. That says it all really and it wasn’t until I discovered acrylics that I concentrated on painting – but that came much devastatingly later. When I became totally blind in 1979, I thought that was it! I could still read books, i.e. by listening to the spoken word and I managed to play the guitar, thanks to the fretted fingerboard, but how the heck was I going to draw and paint again? Over the years that followed, in and between the everyday things of existence, I was always thinking about how I was going to get back to my art and the way to do it – and in some cases, I’m still doing that today! I tried various ideas, including string and Blu Tack, together with differing sizes of very thick paint, but all to no avail. Then, for whatever reason I can’t remember, I thought about plasticine and though it held childhood memories of schooldays, I thought “Why not?”. So I bought some, trying different kinds and settling on Newplast, which seemed just right for what I wanted – the ability to be rolled and moulded into almost whatever shape I wanted or could remember. This, together with its ability to “hold” acrylic paint, meant I had the perfect substitute for creating an artwork – though by that time, I had now given up the idea of ever drawing again with a pencil! You can learn more about my technique here. In 2009 I was invited to demonstrate my methods at an event held in London’s Trafalgar Square. You can read about it here. My work has been featured in two documentaries. You can learn about them here. In the documentaries, you will see how small and cramped my so-called "studio" is and in fact, it is usually as large or small as the canvas board I am using, which is somewhere between fourteen by ten inches or twenty four by eighteen inches. I have the option to slightly change the spatial area by using an easel, but this is only as wide as the easel is high - and it didn't help by having a cameraman and a sound boom operator hemming me further into the floor - but thankfully, though my studio stays more or less the same, this was a one-off occasion on that particular day, though Catalin's frustrating continuity didn't help matters, even though I knew the reasons for it and ultimately, well worth it in the end. Click here to view a gallery of my work.