Promises, promises - I said at the end of last year’s update that I would do better and I’m not in the habit of breaking promises but the last year has consumed me. Sorry for the silence. Where was I? OK, so the knee was replaced with an all-singing, all-dancing new one on 5 November. That was painful. It took a long time to get back to any sort of normality but now, nearly 12 months on, everything (more or less - kneeling is a no no) is wonderful - walking, dancing, swimming etc and, surprisingly, painting! I only realised how physical my painting practice is when I couldn’t move freely. Hooray for the new knee.
Painting restarted tentatively in January. All year I’ve been trying to work out a satisfactory working practice given the limitations that the septic tank imposes - no washing any acrylic down the drain. By early March I was beginning to sort this out - much less use of brushes and utilising various types of silicon tools - Catalyst by Princeton mainly. They are much easier to just wipe clean on rags. Rags are also excellent for smearing paint on in interesting ways!
One of my favourite artists - David Mankin - launched on online course in early April which has been a fascinating dive into his working methods. I’ve been repeating the exercises since then and adapting them to my vision and methodology. With both Art in the Barn and Art Fair Cheshire on the horizon I needed to create some new work and started this in conjunction with the course. Then the weather changed! The studio had no heating (I just used a thermostatically controlled fan heater during the cold weather) and we were intending to resolve this but when the heatwave made the studio both intolerable and impractical (some days it was around 38° which is terrible for both human and paint!) we realised that air conditioning would be a much better option. So, I now have an air-conditioned space which will be wonderful next summer - unless I’ve tempted fate and we have the coldest summer on record!). As well as the air con the studio had a glow-up and is now a very smart matt black building.
Art in the Barn was, as usual, a fabulous event. Every year just gets better and better. Thank you to everyone involved with organising it.
Art Fair Cheshire began last week. As some of you may know I am one of the three person curating team. We had an exhausting two days getting the exhibition up with the help of East Cheshire Hospice staff and volunteers but it looks fabulous and is well worth a visit (I will post this before it finishes. It closes on Thursday 15 October but is open from 10-4 every day until then - open Thursday until 4).
For the foreseeable future I intend to further develop the ideas and techniques that I have been working on through this year and create an exciting new body of work. There are no planned exhibitions (although there might be a pop-up next month in Chelford - I’ll update these notes if so) so my entire focus will be on development! My intention is to keep updating these studio notes with any interesting snippets about these developments.
