Xhosa woman with a pipe and baby.
I love the serenity of this image that I painted a couple of times about ten years ago. I rarely find peace with one of my paintings but wherever the two paintings are I hope their owners find serenity in this woman’s peace.
Serenity on a Sunday.
Below is my instagram reel featuring the Grandmothers Click Song
So long George Shaw. I have loved every minute of my time in the two galleries holding the works of George Shaw at The Box in Plymouth.
The exhibition leaves the Box at the beginning of September, but I took my leave of the exhibition yesterday. It is with a heavy heart that I will never again have that first thing in the morning experience of smelling George’s Humbrol Enamel Paints, as the galleries are opened up. No more sessions of choosing one picture and really concentrating on it to enjoy every detail. All this wallowing in frequent visits to the same exhibitions is a new luxury for me. 50 or so years of visiting exhibitions once or twice, occasionally, more frequently was my previous experience. But now I work in a gallery/exhibition I spend many sessions submerged in exhibitions or galleries full of the work of artists or makers. This could be my shangri-la but I don’t get to choose. Sometimes I spend many hours in galleries that contain art or artifacts that I can find very little connection with. I suspect the sessions with work or a subject that I don’t much like are character building and often, over time, I find something to like or even love. But I will miss your work George Shaw. Thanks for sharing so much that was so deeply personal.
https://www.theboxplymouth.com/events/exhibitions/george-shaw-the-local
Curating and managing group art exhibitions is a rewarding experience. The positives are really valuable to working artists. Seeing what other artists submit is a pleasure and inspiring in equal measure to artists and our visitors
So much frenetic work goes into these temporary exhibitions and yet there are also moments of great calm, often when there are no visitors. Time to really concentrate on one or two pieces of art created by someone else is a real treat.
Listening to visitors comments within their visiting groups is also real guilty pleasure of mine. So much to be learned in a creative space. Spring and summer are the time these fleeting amateur art exhibitions pop up in neighbourhoods all over the world. Don’t just drive or walk past, if you have the time, pop in, for just a few minutes you can step into multiple other worlds. It won’t make the world a better place but it might make you smile.
After 4 days of a glorious Summer Exhibition at Tavistock the sun has set on one part of the Drawn to the Valley #greatsummerofart. The next event will be Open Studios, a very different experience. Group exhibitions are a chance for artists to come together and show what a diverse group we are. Open Studios are the chance to visit individual artists or small groups in a variety of spaces. For this last blog of the summer exhibition I chose blue as the theme. Once again featuring details rather than the whole picture. There is actually a practical reason for this, many pictures are framed with glass which causes reflection problems for photographs. By choosing details I can crop reflections off and widen my choice. So off we go on a blue journey. From a blue sky at sunset ( above) the next picture has a blue sky reflected in water. Just to prove not all reflections are bad!
Exhibitions are also a chance to meet other members, artists mostly work in their own little hobbit holes and just like the whole world we havent got out much recently.
Geoff was an artist I had never met before and we had a little natter. Another coastal blue came from Gilly Spottiswoode someone I meet often, she gives fabulous nattering.
Gilly’s print leads me to another print, something a little more abstract from Stefania D’Amico.
Abstraction returns me briefly to water with Janet Brady’s Drypoint.
And finally a blue bird with a knowing look brings this blog to a close.
Life imitating art as I drove through typical Dartmoor weather to get to the Drawn to the Valley Summer Exhibition at Butchers Hall. Alan Dax captures the meh of Dartmoor perfectly. I have had nothing to do with the summer exhibition beyond some Social Media posts. So it was with a fresh pair of eyes that I made my first visit to the exhibition today. There really are some stunning pieces of work to be seen. This blog just contains snippets of some of the work. For people local to Tavistock you can pop along for the next three days to see the full glory for yourselves. For the sake of this blog I collected some images that can tell a story. The one above obviously tells the story of crossing the moor in the rain.
How I wish this image was an album cover. I’m not sure what leads me to make this statement, but if I had a vinyl collection and this was an album cover this image would always be visible. Truth be told in my Vinyl/Album buying days I did just buy albums for the artwork.
I love the acidity of this painting It reminds me of home made lemonade on a hot summers day. I might not choose to pass through the gate softly, I could rest a while in the cool shadows, slowing down the day to a complete standstill.
Still morning is an image so familiar to me,until recently this location was my regular morning dog walk. I’ve seen this stretch of water on the Tamar in so many different moods, always busy and rarely still. Once I thought I saw a porpoise, cleaving the water in a distinctive way, no-one else was around to corroborate or simply tell me I was imagining things. Another time I slipped twenty feet on the slipway nearby( warning in the name that I failed to acknowledge.) I landed in the silky mud that the small orange boat is resting on, a friend who tried to save me toppled in headlong after me and we laughed like mad women because we could and because it was the only sensible response to two grown women doing something daft.
I’m not yet hugely familiar with Southdown Marina but it is a planned walk in the future with the friend who accompanied me to the exhibition today. We are going to catch the ferry across from Plymouth and explore intriguing places. Helen is known for many admirable qualities and for the flash of turquoise in her hair. She is a Bobber and she loves turquoise, so this picture is particularly apt.
Maybe turquoise is a good place to stop this meandering. More tomorrow.
Visiting artists in their workspace is a multisensory experience. One I always have mixed feelings about beforehand but nearly always come away enriched in so many ways. Not always arty embellishment of my soul either. My mixed feelings are caused mostly by an inate shyness and reticence about walking into someone else’s creative space. Yesterday I visited three creatives participating in the South Tamar Art Trail. All in a small hamlet in the Tamar Valley known as Rising Sun.
My first visit was to Gudrun’s fused glass studio. A buzzy place with a bead making workshop going on.
Bead making is mesmerising. Fire, dexterity and concentration are significant factors in the magic of fused glass bead making. Gudrun also fuses ideas and creativity with her neighbour John who creates his craft in a woodshed filled with equipment and wood for recycling into wondrous objects.
Gudrun walked us over to John’s workplace. The smell of freshly drilled or cut wood was intoxicating as we first entered. John recycles wood from all sorts of places and the fragrances from unusual woods create a heady brew. From John’s workshop we walked to Suzy Billing Mountain’s unit on a small industrial unit nearby.
Suzy has been making fluid art for a couple of years. Walking into her unit blasts your eyes with colour. It is everywhere, including on Suzy. She gave us a demo of her style of working and we nattered a lot. Having said that our eyes were blasted, I’ve chosen a really subtle piece to show her style. Mostly because it sums up the colours of walking in the Tamar Valley in early summer.
South Tamar Art Trail runs until Sunday 27th June.
The last two days have been both busy and hugely enjoyable. Finally we have been able to put on a Spring Exhibition featuring the work of artists and makers in the Tamar Valley. Last year we did all the planning and preparation work, only to have to cancel the exhibition at short notice. Planning for this year certainly felt like deja vu but with the added bonus of factoring in Covid safe planning for a public gathering in an indoor space.
‘Hanging Out’ with other humans for the last two days bringing the exhibition and its venue to life after so long was as much of a pleasure as seeing all the artworks blow in from all over the Tamar Valley.
And ‘blow in’ they certainly did with gusting winds of up to 55 mph and torrential rain.
After one day of construction and one day of curating and hanging we are ready to open the doors at 10:30 this morning. Here is a glimpse of what we have been up to.
The first floor mini gallery. Tiny works of art at affordable prices,with beautiful views of the surrounding countryside
Hanging in the stairwell, maximising available space to allow safe distance to enjoy the exhibition.
The ground floor gallery. If the weather improves this area will be flooded with fresh air and sunshine. What a shame we are not able to host a ‘Private View’ event this year. Doors open at 10:30 this morning. Opening hours are 10:30-4:30 daily for a week and then just a morning opening next Saturday. The address is on the posters below.
Lovely news this week. Drawn to the Valley will have a Spring Exhibition this year. This time last year we were recycling the leaflets and posters of the 2020 Spring Exhibition after it had been cancelled.
Looking at the #marchinthevalley on Instagram we have some interesting work emerging from the Valley this spring.
Even more exciting is that the working party can meet outside after April 14th to start making plans.
Some of us have met on Zoom meetings and a few of us managed a drawing day in October but beyond that we havent seen each other in over a year.
Positive engagement with social media has increased during this Pandemic year, there is a greater diversity of work being shown by more members than this time a year ago.
The Spring Exhibition traditionally kicks off the artistic year for Drawn to the Valley. Although considerably later than the usual March dates . 2021 promises to be a vivid reflection of our endeavours during a very unusual time.
It’s a red dot kind of day. By tradition when an artwork is sold at a gallery or exhibition it is marked with a red dot.
This painting has set off on a journey to Brighton with a new owner.
The picture started life in Marylebone, London. Strange things happen around the Mews Lanes behind Harley Street in the middle of the night. Famous people arrive under the cover of darkness and florists clear out the previous days blooms, near perfect they are dumped in the back of trailers to be replaced by freshly bought blooms from New Covent Garden.The Mews were my regular night time walk, bleep in hand, to clear my head towards the end of 24 hour on-call shifts. I took to photographing the discarded blooms. There have been several paintings inspired by these nocturnal wanderings.
I’m not sure where this one is off to. It is an early sketch from a new project. I’m exploring androgynous figures being both overwhelmed and enhanced by abstract fields of colour.
I suspect this is the last ‘red dot day’ of 2020. After yesterday’s announcement of a second national lockdown by the British Government there may well not be any more chances to exhibit until 2021.
Huge thanks to everyone who attended the exhibition in Tavistock, especially to those who bought original artworks. You have made many Artists very happy.
Today was Vernissage Day at Butchers Hall in Tavistock. It was a triumph of creativity over Covid – 19. The excited buzz of a well attended Private View with vividly dressed artists and guests it was not. No canapés, no music, no performance poetry, however in its own quiet, socially distanced way it was a celebration of hard work and achievement. What impressed me was the texture of the experience.
The Mayor of Tavistock opened the exhibition with words that by now, in 2020, we are all too familiar with, unusual, difficult, unpredictable. She noted that many of the 70+artists were experimenting with different styles because of the experiences and challenges of 2020. For this blog I thought I might just choose a few uncredited images to illustrate some of the textures and colours that I experienced today. A more formal blog of the exhibition can happen after it has opened to the public.
In sharp October sunshine even the building got into the texture category.
Exhibition of Drawn to the Valley Artists. Wednesday 28th October – Sunday 2nd November 9-30-5-00 except Sunday when it closes at 2, Butchers Hall, Tavistock.
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