The Hours....

oil on panel study, 8 " x 10", current work

I hobble down the long garden to the studio on my crutches each morning, the dog faithfully following me, hoping I will throw the ball, jump precariously up the step into the space, set up my speaker and Bluetooth to either some music (this week: ‘Here It Is- A Tribute to Leonard Cohen (I can’t recommend this enough), and ‘Communication’ by Karl Bartos, former Kraftwerk member, whose 600 page autobiography I’ve just completed (brilliant read) or a Podcast ( lately lots of ‘The Rest Is Politics’ with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and my favourite a new run of The Adam Buxton Podcast), and climb up on my high stool to the desk easel, palette and paints set up on the high table, take another reference photo as a starting point, and a fresh, primed small painting panel, and then set to work for a few hours. Once I’m actually safely in the studio it feels like the only thing I can do that easily at the moment, but as it’s painting, that’s not so bad is it? 

oil on panel study, 10" x 12", current 

oil on panel study, 10" x 12", current 

In fact, I’ve been painting 2-3 paintings a day these last two weeks and I’m really enjoying it. As I can only work sitting down, I’m forced to work small, but these limits are liberating. As most my paintings start from primary reference photographs but against the limits of time, I’m enjoying the opportunity to dig a lot deeper into these photographs and try and unearth some new ideas, particularly in the ongoing development of my painting language, experimenting, always experimenting. 

oil on panel study, 8" x 10", current

oil on panel study, 8"x10", current

oil on panel study, 10" x 12", current

At the moment, I’m hooking into something much 

looser, more abstract, but not abstract, and continually thinking about my use of colour and the light in the paintings. These elements have become much more central in the last 2 years to how I concieve the paintings. I’ve made some new motorway studies, which are dynamic and offer some nice ideas for compositions, but also some new studies of the local woodlands and the common which have a very different feel, and present more difficulties in a way, in trying to do something more original with scenes like these, but I remain committed to both subjects. I’m just playing around, making stuff and trying not to over think it at the moment. 

oil on panel study, 10" x 12", current

I’m thinking about doing some portraits and still lives next week….

Audience Feedback....Birmingham Open Studios 2022

Studio view

I welcomed visitors to my studio last weekend as a participating artist in the Birmingham Open Studios event across the city (although most of the artists participating seem to be based in South Birmingham, my neck of the woods). I enjoyed it. Friends and strangers came, and I enjoyed discussing my work and sharing my studio space. It had been a bit difficult to tidy too much with me being on crutches, but at the same time I didn’t really want to: if I was a visitor I would have enjoyed looking ‘behind the scenes’ of the artist and the work. So comments were made about my large, unruly palette, what paints I used, the canvasses in preparation and the many, many brushes. 

I also talked a lot about the subject matter too: my conviction in looking in ‘your own backyard’ for inspiration. I had chosen to display paintings based in Kings Heath where I live to emphasise this and thinking they may have local interest-and also about the importance of just trying to make the work you felt you needed to make without thinking too much about an audience, as this is where problems can often lie. These are conversations I started at art school, and never really go away. Of course, you are just making the art you need to make. And yet…it would be a bit disingenuous to say mental notes are not taken of comments that are made, observing what paintings seem to ‘land’, which postcards sold, and which do not. But at the end of the day, from my experience, these things are entirely unpredictable. Every viewer brings something of themselves as to why they may be attracted to a certain piece. These things are certainly not universal, so it's best to carry on regardless.

'Grounded II', oil on canvas, 40 x 30cms, 2021

Many of the visitors to the studio had found their way there attracted by my painting of the car in snow that had been in the brochure (above) That was a surprise to me, although I have always been pleased with this piece and another that accompanied it (below). I sold both and could have sold that first one three times over. 

'Grounded III', oil on canvas, 60 x 50cms, 2021

Postcards for sale ( a new thing...)

I also sold a small studio still life and a small ‘lorry park’ landscape. I also sold an etching (these are now becoming consistently popular at exhibitions), and nearly all of the postcards I had made, What a good idea these were…