It’s New Years Eve and I’m coming to the
end of a busy but enjoyable Christmas break spent with my family. I was
watching ‘Toy Story 3’ the other night with the kids, and, never having seen it
before, was really struck by the level of detail and the accuracy of it’s
depictions in the creation of this world within a world of children’s toys and
imaginations. I often enjoy occasionally stopping to look around the frequent
chaos of our home which is thanks largely to the children’s toys scattered about the place.
I love following the trail of colourful
plastic and coming across allsorts of weird, often surreal, juxtapositions of
different inanimate objects and their unusual colours, forms and sizes. This evening I spent
fifteen minutes to take a few photos around the home to demonstrate this, and
say that these photographs represent the sort of scenerios which occur, in my
experience, on any given day when you have young children with too many toys….There
is a project there I tell my students, but they never listen. I can assure you
none of these photos were contrived, they were just as I found them
It’s been another busy year for my painting practice. Although I would have liked to make more work, I now feel pretty primed to
launch myself into some exciting new things with a clearer head in 2015, after
what feels like quite a period of experimentation.
Still, I’ve been in five exhibitions this
year, including a fairly large solo one, “Black Highway’ at Nuneaton Museum and
Art Gallery in January. I’m currently in a Christmas group show at Cupola
Gallery in Sheffield called ‘Delicious’, as well as the West Midlands Open
2014. The experiences I have had so far with Cupola have pleasingly and hopefully
seen me taking the first steps towards the presentation of my work into welcome,
newer, commercial opportunities, an ambition I wanted to fulfill at the start of the year. Developing
this is something I want to continue in 2015, and I know building relationships
with these sort of galleries will take a long time, but I have alot more
insight into this than I did at the start of the year.
I still want to continue with my own artist-led
projects though, and the freedom this allows, and am hoping to do more with
Indigo Octogan Projects, as well as hopefully participating in another ‘By The
Way’ exhibition with Nottingham based group Land Lies Fallow, which we are
planning for next December in Birmingham. I also want to do much more with my
smaller works on paper and printmaking and get these out to other galleries and
perhaps art fairs. And so on and so on....! I'm never short of ideas for the work, just time.
It’s good to have a plan. It’s even more
interesting when things stray from the plan. We’ll see how it goes. Happy New
Year!
(Santa on the stairs sums me up on any
given day, and certainly at the end of 2014)
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