Nurture Your creativity: advice I would give to my Teenage Self

What advice would you give to your teenage self?

Sometimes I feel I have put off nurturing my creativity for too long. Other times I think it was seen in other parts of my life, like photography and property development.

My recent efforts with oil paints have highlighted the many choices I still must make around my style and my medium of choice.

I shall post an update on this painting when it is completed.

Urban Rooftop Landscape Oil Painting the Making

Why Painting Julian Opie Simplicity is Quite Hard

Our teacher took us through some portraits this week in my art class. The usual classics were there for us to study composition, tone, paint strokes etc. But I was struck by how much I was drawn into Julian Opie’s work.


I’d never seen his work before, and I noticed how my eyes were pulled into pattern finding.


However, I took on the challenge of seeing what my marks and finish might be like if I painted in the style of Julian Opie. I initially thought it might be easy; perhaps I was being lazy, but when I realised the attention to detail demanded in getting the contrasting tones right. Another hurdle I had to surmount was the light and the dark shapes to make sure those correctly gave the impression of light and shade. I discovered in class that trying to do this using oil colour is another difficulty because Julian Opie probably uses acrylics. But never mind, it’s all practice.

Urban winter sunrise inspires blue & yellow landscape in oil

This week I started a landscape. It was based on one of my popular IG posts where we had a spectacular sunrise in London on Monday. From the images below it is clear to see that I am not a photo realist. There is a touch of impressionism, pop art and fantastical influences in my marks. It reminds me of the comical quality of British painter Beryl Cook.