STUDIO CONWAY

A week ago, I would have started this blog post with an apology for the long gap since the last one. But I am not going to, because I have discovered the concept of ‘ma’. ‘Ma’ is the Japanese idea that the space between things is as equally important as the things themselves. So, the......

Thank you to everyone who gave me comments in my last post where I asked Do you want to help me curate the next show?. If you remember I had ten pieces and had to choose five to hang. You can see all ten together here. It was an interesting exercise. Of the ten, two......

Would you like to help me curate the next show I have with Leah Higgins? I have been painting on paper and now have ten works to choose from but only frames and room on the  hanging plan for five. Which five would you pick to hang? If, indeed any! You can assume that the......

What is the point of art? There are possibly as many answers to that question as people asking it, but one is simply: to make the world better. Making and looking at art can make the world better simply because creativity releases ‘happy’ chemicals in the brain and distracts from anxious thoughts. Goodness knows my......

For the forthcoming TRACES exhibition I set myself a brief of including work relating to the history of my family in St.Helens.  I am not sure my living, breathing, fell-walking parents are going be that happy to be counted as ‘historical’, but I could not resist making this piece for the show. My Dad was......

  The battle of the Somme had always been a sobering but impersonal piece of history to me until a few months ago. I rang my Dad for a piece of information to aid me in an art work and he went rambling on about the bit of family history I wasn’t asking about. I......

For 2018, I am not making Resolutions for my studio practice, I am making New Year Rituals.   Over the last few months I’ve developed an intrigue about the power of rituals.  There are some rituals I have embraced which are ancient, handed down over generations and wrapped in religious tradition. Others are rituals I......

Titles are contradictory creatures. Sometimes they push themselves forward from nowhere, fully formed, demanding an art work to complete them. Other times, art lies lonely on the table, looking good, but without a name and so their identity remains somehow shrouded. Some artists care not about titles. Or at least they feel that Untitled is......

Who doesn’t love a box of crayons? And if you could help save a life with them then how cool would that be? Chris Carberry is a 21 year old member of my golf club. He has had cancer twice and has already lost his leg to it. Now it has come back again. It......

Visitors to my house often asked the same thing: Why don’t you have any of your own art on your walls? There were two reasons. Firstly, I like to look at other people’s art. Secondly I had never made anything that I deemed ‘good enough’ according to my own criteria. Tonight that ended and we finally –......