Winter snow

Well we have had the most snow here in London for about 20 years apparently. Transport ground to a halt, schools closed along with many businesses. A great time to be out and about taking photographs if you could get anywhere.




My long time haunt, the local churchyard, was just the place to walk to and see the snow scene. The landscape or cityscape always looks so different under a blanket of snow and the light of course is very different. The trees looked particularly lovely, especially the yew and the conifers. A heavy snow storm came down as I was taking photos and short videos and I loved that sense of being in a snow globe.

Chinese New year

Just before all the snow, I was in Chinatown to see the New year celebrations. It was really great to see all the streets full of red lanterns. In the middle of winter in all the cold weather it brought a real sense of cheer to London.


There were stalls outside the shops selling loads of kitch ox animals, it being the year of the ox, paper dragons, small hand drums, fortune cookies and loads more. It was very cold and I was glad of the crowds at some points that kept the wind off me. At one point I was next to the drummer at the start of one of the lion dances, but as it started I was left behind as the huge crowd surged forward.
I could just see the dragons head pop up and down from time to time, as it made it's way down the street paying visits to the shops and restaurants.

Sketches and throwies

Doing a few sketches with oil pastels, with a rather nice set of Sennelier artist quality pastels.
I haven't used oil pastels much recently, usually working with a selection of different soft pastels.
My problem with soft pastels is how to fix and store them easily. I am working on organizing my work into different folders and so on, not something that comes easily to me.

Following a brief article on the Graffiti Research Lab, and the idea of throwies,( link is to video about throwies) little LED lights fixed to batteries and thrown onto urban structures vehicles ect. I decided it might be one way of working with lights, and I found a supplier of LED lights and ordered a few to experiment with.

The Graffiti Research lab has a good website with photos and videos of various interventions including clever uses of laser tagging and filling in by computer. I like the idea of using something temporary and harmless to make comments on social and political issues. It's almost incongruous the idea of pretty little coloured lights making a statement about war for instance.

Video Art

A New Year and a new course on video editing. Of course I don't have a Mac or the very expensive software at home, but some of the skills will be transferable I'm sure.
I have quite a collection of videos waiting for a bit of editing so I can upload them. Doing some more research for video artists lead me to Jonas Mekas where there are some great short videos to download and others to buy. I liked the little intro video by Jonas as well.

Here a couple of my short videos, filmed at the Christmas market along the Southbank.