To create art you have to accept that a certain amount of the time you spend will be wasted. You have to show up and do the work anyway, knowing that the first three hours you may spend going in circles. But you also know that those hours may be necessary to get you to […]
I’m not going to lie – getting back to school routine this week has been hard. Getting up in the dark is not my idea of fun. Add a bit of a cold wintery weather into the mix and I would far rather be tucked up under the duvet for a gentle start to the […]
It’s always exciting to see the empty walls of art fair stands transformed during the day into a show with a rich variety of colour and styles as artists hang and arrange their work. It was my first time exhibiting at Windsor Contemporary Art Fair and it didn’t disappoint; I found it to be […]
Ever wondered what happened on a painting before it was finished – how it looked along the way? I wrote a while back about knowing when a painting is finished but sometimes it’s hard for me to remember where it began, and quite how many stages it passed through on the way. So I thought […]
Summer is sketchbook time for me – a time to re-stock the pages which can be the starting point for so many ideas. I enjoy essential time away to become absorbed in a drawing and the feeling of working on something with no judgement on the outcome. This year I’m trying to avoid drawing straightforward […]
Making my own charcoal and ink sort of falls in line with stuffing a mushroom – life is too short. But on holiday we sometimes do strange things to fill time and make projects with children! It is a dream of mine to have a compact travelling art kit. Sometimes I manage to neatly pack […]
This week I have been looking again at the sketchbook work of Barbara Rae * – if you don’t know her work you are in for a treat! Which materials are right for the job? Finding the right materials to work in sketchbooks can be a search. It’s all part of developing your process and […]
“This time I was sure it would be easier” – how wrong could I be? It’s not unusual after getting ready for an event to have a bit of downtime. (That seems more forgiving than ‘artist’s block’) Often it takes me time to get going again. A while ago I made a tapestry for a […]
What we all want from art is much discussed… Is it something ‘to go with the sofa’ or something that makes us feel rested, or something that challenges us and makes us see things in a new way? Perhaps all of these. Certainly it’s different for different people, which is why it’s wonderful that there […]
Making two paintings just using black and white as a tonal painting exercise seemed a natural progression of my new contrast project, even if it is way outside my normal colour comfort zone. What did I hope to learn? Our eyes see high contrast shapes more swiftly so how can we use that to lead […]
After a bit of a break over Easter, there’s nothing like a challenge to get you kick started on some new work so when I saw the 100 days project was about to begin again I was ready. This idea was started by @ElleLuna on Instagram: do something consistently for 100 days to build a […]
I’m often asked to donate work to help raise funds for charity and, where I can, I love to help out. So I was pleased to discover that at Reading Contemporary Art Fair they have a section where exhibiting artists are asked to provide a painting for a gallery wall. All canvases are supplied so the […]
