All that glistens will lead us through the second to last live blog of the Spring exhibition. Although it may not be obvious in my photos, all these works have a little bit of twinkle about them.
Today is the last day of the exhibition at The Market Hall, Devonport. An exhibition worth driving the extra mile for. Free parking, great architecture, and a cafe to natter in.
Huge congratulations must go to the organising team of this fabulous exhibition, the building team, the committee and the artists who are participating.
20 years of supporting and encouraging artists and makers in the Tamar Valley has built a diverse and talented organisation. Ready to move into the next 20 years.
Live blogging/pondering from an art exhibition with a theme of turquoise, inspired by the plaque on Devonport Market Hall. So many artists love turquose this is not a difficult task.
But an artist, Anne Blackwell Fox , wearing turquoise,was in the building when I took this picture, entitled Emergence
Anne Blackwell-Fox
The last two turquoises are significantly different to one another, but they both feature missing triangular chunks. Perhaps the bigger significance is that they almost mark the top and bottom of the Drawn to the Valley geographical boundary
Drawn to the Valley, Artist and Makers Group has become very plugged-in to the Arts and Making culture of Plymouth, in recent years. The current Spring Exhibition opened this morning in a new-to-us venue. The Market Hall Devonport.
I will be here a few times so I thought choosing a colour theme would keep things spicy and interesting. My apologies to artists whose Orange moments have not been captured. The reflections in this magnificent exhibition space are quite tricksy. Hopefully you will get your colour moment in a different hue.
For once I was completely ready . No last-minute tweaking for me. Which was just as well as a friend of mine had her own disaster. An escaped Peridot.
Her Peridot escaped as she was finishing a necklace. Not in the normal run of things a big problem but she was tweaking the night before she was due to deliver her work to me and then fly off to Greece.
She arranged a Peridot delivery to my house and gave me easy to follow instructions to follow for me to tweak on her behalf.
My tweazers had quite the day. Not for them the normal chore, the pulling of a stray chin hair. Oh no, they became artisanal tweezers, craftsperson tweezers. Tweezers of importance. Tweezers in the spotlight.
And for just a moment I experienced the joy of being a jeweller.
Sometimes it is a surprise, even to me, what goes on in the studio.
Late blog, I am so flaky if I miss my early morning slot. Here we are mid -afternoon and what to ponder?
I can celebrate that I have cleared a backlog of 27,000 emails. Woo Hoo! Now to do this accurately has taken me two days. How do people clearing emails for naughty reasons, for instance Governments or big business, do it so quickly?
Our yard now has a fabulous trellis extension ready to accommodate climbing plants and deter our neighbours cats, chickens and other unwanted creatures, from using the wall as a super highway. Pictures will follow when I have moved all our plants back into their growing positions.
I could be all giddy and excited and start it now but I have paintings to sort out and pack up for delivery to an exhibition tomorrow.
Stonehouse Fruits
The exhibition space has a 360 degree film projection dome. Our paintings will be projected on a massive scale , which is very exciting. This little painting will be about 12 feet square. That is going to be surreal!
Most mornings before I write the blog I have a little canter through various on-line, news-gathering services, check out the 3rd party blog prompt, and consider the blog I was planning to write. One thing jumped out from news gathering that is quite pertinent to todays blog. Also the 3rd party prompt has only a one sentence answer. A gloriously simple answer that I could have used on any of my many days on earth.
What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today? My skin.
Yesterday I did two very small paintings. They are somewhere between abstract and representational, closer to abstract.
One of the articles I read this morning was about, Euphoric recall.
My life, in my old skin, is pretty much one long example of euphoric recall. My two paintings of yesterday are far more euphoric than real life. Maritime Sunburst Lichen is one of my favourite things to see on rocks.
Here it is in its active stage.
But as it ages it flattens out and leaves circular scars.
On sunny winter days it just makes me smile. My abstracts of yesterday were painted from memory with no reference images. I just threw in some dutch gold to brighten them up , they are exactly euphoric recall because some days even Sunburst Lichen can look pretty dull.
But in my head, the lichens are gaudy circles of natural joy.
Which is very much an example of euphoric recall at its finest.
In general my blogs are all about the joyous things in life even if sometimes the inspiration point starts off in a darker place.
Yesterday was a great day of life imitating art and glorious colour.
This magnificent tree was on my walk to my favourite haberdashery store. Where I needed to buy a spring green thread.
I just caught the tree in his skeletal form before the sunshine brought on Spring growth.
I was also on the search for some orange buttons. My favourite navy blue cardigan has contrasting (non-contrasting) dark brown buttons. Every time I put the cardigan on I feel the energy drain away from my soul . Dark Brown with Navy Blue! Make at 140 saved the day.
Joyful too was the end to a recycling project. I store bigger, older canvasses in the garage. I had three, all the same size that I was planning to paint over once the weather improved. A couple of weeks ago I discovered that the local mice had started a recycling project of their own. Two were unusable but one was in perfect condition. Their nests must be in glorious technicolour. I haven’t painted many large paintings since the Covid lockdowns. Smaller watercolours or prints have been my thing since then. I wondered how two years of painting small would have affected painting big. I also now live in an urban and maritime environment rather than rolling countryside. My subject matter, this week, was a curious mix of urban and natural.
We live in an area with lots of old concrete built as defences for the Naval Dockyard and Port of Plymouth. Some of the older concrete is a bit battered and breaking down. Nature manages to find a way of rehabilitating the ugly angular shapes. In this picture Sea Holly fills the gaps
How has two years of small watercolour painting and some printing affected the bigger picture?
Confidence I think, in painting with colours that I would not naturally use much of , and accuracy in creating layers. Spending time with the bobbers, some of whom are obsessed with turquoise and blues. Just for comfort’s sake, I hid my favourite reds, golds and purples in the underpainting.
Erygerum and Concrete is ready for some Summer exhibitions. I am so glad the sun is out and life is full of colour again.
Concatenation is a wonderful thing. Post proper job I have dabbled in admin and writing for Arts organisations and now in a strange twist of concatenation as a non-tennis player I do admin for a tennis club.
Not ‘just’ a tennis club but a coastal garden and Clubhouse that is available to host community events.
One such community is Rhizome Artists who meet once a week in the clubhouse. Rhizome are Exhibiting locally and the venue of the exhibition has a cafe that does great coffee and cake so a visit was the obvious thing to do.
So coffee, and cake but not concatenation were my anticipated outcomes of the visit.
Early on I met Tim who was taking some standard photographs of the whole exhibition. We had a small natter and he left. I enjoyed my coffee and cake and a lovely wide-ranging conversation with my gentleman companion. We then spent a lot of time enjoying the art, some of which is in the pictures below.
Two of my favourite things. Spring sunshine and a complicated image. The Thursday before a long weekend is always a little bit exciting. For my art group, it is the final weekend of a very successful exhibition. This is the view from our sales desk. Sunshine and showers, caught in a colourful moment.
theoldmortuary.design 