Venetian Backwater Drawing

I draw, I don’t paint. I use coloured pencils, graphite, fine liner pens and gold leaf in my work. My drawings are rarely larger than 12” x 10” they take on average 30-40 hours to complete. I draw what I find beautiful. Beauty is important to me and I believe it is often scorned today in favour of more conceptual and intellectual ideas. I believe that at every level we are looking for the beautiful, something that is more than necessary, something that feeds our soul. We flock to the countryside to experience the pastoral, we travel to view the beauty of past cultures and some of us bemoan the (perceived) lack of it in our own. That’s why the starting point for everything I do is the pursuit of the beautiful, not the practical or the conceptual. I find beauty mainly in the natural world, but cities such as Venice have captivated me, there is such a sad and grave beauty in decay and the passing of time. Venice is a city clinging to an almost lost meaning, it is almost, but not quite a theme park. So my work is about recording the beauty of what I see around me, I take hundreds of photographs and use these as a starting point, I don’t literally copy them I often make changes to a position of a building or the colour. I love colour, the more saturated the better. Influences include Gustave Klimpt for his colour and composition and the beauty of his surfaces, and John Singer Sargent (the light!) As well as practicing my art I am a teacher of art in a secondary school in Suffolk, England.