visual art

As a musician I find myself drawn towards the abstract end of the plastic arts spectrum. The expressive power of colour, line and form can speak directly to the soul without the intermediary of intellectual cognition. That, anyway, is my excuse for my frequent dabblings in media that I should perhaps have kept well away from. Without any graphic skills to speak of I have nevertheless always been a doodler, and since the middle of the 1990's have taken these doodles more seriously. For me computer art offers many avenues of expression, though I also like to work with drawing and painting in the world of space, time and matter.

Gallery 1

Gallery 2.

some "contemporary classical" music

Recently (2/3/2006)I found out how to add a MIDI file to a web page in a simple way, thanks to information provided on the web by Walt Howe. I've used this to make available my five studies for violin and piano. Clicking on one of these will bring up Windows media player or equivalent, but you can minimise that and listen whilst you continue browsing. In any case each piece is only about a minute in duration. The sound quality may not be that good, but it's a start.

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web design

I have a confession to make: this Saltaire Arts website is being constructed by me, though with a lot of help from other people, particularly Caroline, who has been a very dedicated photographer as well as giving me a great deal of support and encouragement, and Simon who, as well as being a very original and talented artist, is also a skilled website designer with a fine way of presenting graphics. For a good example of Simon's work you can look at the site he constructed for Daniel Cooper, a friend who works with stone. My brother Steve is an IT professional with many years experience and has helped me to grasp some of the basic ideas of web programming.

I have only been learning website design since February 2006, and haven't made much progress as yet. But one can do quite a bit with very limited means. The main tools I use are Adobe Photoshop for image processing, and Dreamweaver which is an excellent web-design environment. It means one does not have to tangle much with HTML which is aesthetically a very ugly language, although it is the essential internet workhorse.