Call and Response...

'Autumn Again', 100 x 142cms, oil on canvas, 2010

I’m pleased to announce that I sold two of my recent paintings last week to the Great Places Housing Group in Manchester. They have been working with the Open Art Project in Huddersfield to purchase a range of different artworks for one of their new sheltered housing schemes. A friend of mine from Open Art saw a recent painting, ‘Autumn Again’, through the website and asked if I’d be interested in submitting some work for consideration by Great Places. I did, and from a total of 38 other artist’s submissions they enthusiastically, by all accounts, selected some of my work. They chose this one, and ‘Winter Painting’ below.

'Winter Painting', oil on canvas, 100 x 100cms, 2010

It’s a great feeling, but also some validation for the hard work I’ve been putting in trying to develop this side of my work. I feel I’m currently making some difficult decisions about the direction I want to take, but despite this, I’m enjoying making the work tremendously. More so than in a long time, and I feel very involved with things.

It’s also a strange thing to be wrapping and delivering paintings I’ve not had the opportunity to exhibit and share more widely. I’m particularly pleased with ‘Autumn Again’. I only did it in November too, so I haven’t had much time to ‘live’ with it either. I'm not even sure if that is the title yet. But what can I do? This is a great opportunity, and it’s great someone else likes it enough to want to buy it, and for a good price too. What else will it do? Sit in my studio because I happen to like it? The next one is more important.

You can’t have it all ways in my position….

Then again, it may be good to have 'Autumn Again' leave. It has created a real 'bounce' in the studio since I made it, where every consequent painting has been made as a response to it in some way. It has created a sort of 'call and response', like in the gospel singing tradition. For example, it lead to one painting that I've just re-painted, because the one I made after it gave me fresh ideas for the former. This has then created a 'bounce' with this new painting, where I now need to re-paint this, because some of the techniques I've now learned from the re-painting of the previous one would work well on the new one to take it further. Confused? Me too...