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This year is full of exhibitions which is making life rather busy! It’s hard to understate the amount of work that goes in to organising these events and getting the work ready. I have an exhibition starting tomorrow at Snape Maltings in the Pond Gallery where I exhibited last year. It’s tricky to find spaces to exhibit at but this is a nice one in a destination location with some other galleries on site, including the new Winch Gallery which currently has an exhibition of paintings by Maggi Hambling.

Most of the artists I have spoken to this year have been finding it hard to make sales as the current economic climate is not really conducive to what might be classed as ‘luxury’ items. The exhibition I had recently at The Apex in Bury St Edmunds was no exception – lots of nice comments but not many people in a position to buy the artwork right now.

Still, we have a lovely group of four of us exhibiting at Pond Gallery so we will see how that goes. You can see a kind of exhibition catalogue here. I will also have some smaller pieces available as well as cards.

After that, I will be preparing for the next exhibition at Aldeburgh in the Courtyard Gallery. This one involves an even bigger rental outlay so it is going to be hit and miss as to whether the 3 of us even cover our costs. The problem is, if you don’t get out there, you won’t sell anything so you really have to take a chance sometimes. Again, it is a lovely venue in one of the art capitals of England so hopefully the right people will visit!

I have taken part in Suffolk Open Studios I think for 5 or 6 years now. Unfortunately it was cancelled last year but is happening in a slightly different format this year in that there is no big printed directory listing all the artists, but instead there is a great App that lists everyone and shows who is open on each weekend. You can find it here if you haven’t already got it: http://sos.atlas-live.com

The weather is not looking that great for the weekend coming so in addition to the studio at the end of may garden being open, I will be opening up the back of my house which will include my kitchen and dining room! The idea is to have a big sale of art in the house and as I have been tidying up the studio I have realised that I have quite a large number of paintings to clear that are going to be offered at 50% off, so there will be many bargains to be had.

In addition, as I have lots of paintings out at the moment (Ferini gallery, Bent Hill Gallery and The Last Anchor in Ipswich) I found that I needed to do some more new paintings for open studios so I will have some new, small paintings up for sale. I am very excited about them as they have turned out really nicely.

I also have the new style of abstract paintings that I have started this year – I think there are 5 in that collection – and I will be working on one during the weekend.

I have also been making some more greeting cards which will be on sale too.

There will also be a display showing how I create the fluid work – it’s not really possible to do much in the way of a demo on those as they need a dust free location to dry and with people coming and going that is unlikely to happen. However, I do have a couple that are waiting to have their resin coating applied so they are still works in progress.

If you are planning to come and visit then just turn up any time between 11am and 5pm and come round the side of the house. There will be plenty of signs.

There will be hand sanitiser available and only one set of people in the studio at a time.

For a fair while I have wanted to start painting some multi-layered abstracts in a similar style to some I have done in the past. There are a few artists that I admire who do this kind of painting – in particular I could name Jane Davies (based in the US), Boo Compton and Patricia Lomax (both Suffolk artists). I love their style of work and have been waiting for a while to get a chance to spend time doing art like that.

Now that my son has gone back to school again after Lockdown 3, I have been able to spend some more time i the studio again and have started on some of these canvases. I have a few on the go – a couple of them I have been working on for a while – and they do take quite a while to finish as they need so many layers and iterations until I am happy with the result. So far I have finished two of them, although the first one was not totally in the style I was aiming for.

I hope to have some of them done by this summer and all the ones that I finish will of course be listed on the website. The first one finished is this one:

I’m really happy how it turned out although I think people will be surprised as to how much of a deviation it is from my fluid acrylic style. It may not be to everyone’s taste but I believe it is important to learn and develop and pursue new avenues in art every now and again. It is not completely dissimilar to some old paintings I did a number of years ago for example this one from 2011:

It is interesting to play with mark making and layering and using different sized strokes to create the final effect.

This year is still a bit of an unknown. I have had more exhibitions cancelled in the next few months. Things are unlikely to get back to any kind of normality before June at least and because events take a lot of planning, there may still be more cancellations.

I will be taking part in Suffolk Open Studios again this year. I’ll be opening my studio/garden/drive for the last weekend in June and will be doing some painting for any visitors to see plus will have a display of all the paintings I have at home.

Looking back at my last blog post I now can’t actually remember what the exciting opportunity was going to be! No doubt covid put a stop to it whatever it was!

We are nearing the end of the coronavirus lockdown period that was imposed in March and things have changed massively since my last blog post.

I had quite a number of exhibitions lined up between March and September and all of them have now been cancelled which has obviously seriously limited any sales that I can make. In fact all of my exhibitions tend to happen in that period so there is only one possible exhibition left in November for this year which hopefully will go ahead. I will look to see if there are other events that I can take part in but I don’t expect things to return to normal until next year at least.

The Arts in general have taken a big hit and I just hope that the galleries can actually survive this period of closure as I know some are worried about whether they will be able to reopen at all.

For me, I have not been able to do too much in terms of new paintings as I have been home schooling my 6 year old. He has now gone back to school for a few weeks so I have had time to do a few bits. I finished the large commissioned wave painting which ended up looking really great after a few reworks. the thing with commission paintings as opposed to ones that I do myself is that you are working to a specific goal which may mean reworking paintings to suit the client, which is fine, but as this happens 99% of the time there is an extra cost to any commissioned paintings of 20% on top of standard prices which you can find here.

I am thinking of having a front drive sale of paintings but need to combine times when I have all my paintings here, the weather is good and my son is at his Dad’s! That may be some time in August and I will publicise it on social media if and when it happens.

I have been looking at doing some pendulum pour paintings so will be starting these in the next couple of weeks. I’ve been looking at the consistency of the paint to pour through and keep going without dripping. I love the regular patterns that these produce (a bit like the old spirograph!) so will video these as I do them.

In the meantime I have an exciting opportunity coming up next week (more details to follow) and will hopefully have a few small paintings in a display exhibition in Chelmsford in August – I’ll add that to the events if it happens.

Hoping that everyone is safe and well and we are all able to exhibit and meet soon!

It’s 1st March and finally the sun is shining, the daffodils are in bloom and there is light at the end of the miserable wet and windy winter!

Things are really busy in the studio. I only have room for 2 paintings to dry at once as they have to dry completely flat (spirit level flat or else the paint will shift!) so I am constantly checking if paintings are dry enough to move out the way of the drying floor so that I can start more. Some paintings don’t actually work as I would like so that is a few days wasted (or not really wasted as it is all experience learnt from!) when that happens.

After selling the work I had in Ferini gallery in Pakefield, I had a couple of other commissions to do and paintings to take up there, so they now have a few of mine in. It is a lovely space with a wide variety of beautiful art so if you are nearby go and have a look.

Another commission I have taken on is a larger wave painting. This brings issues in itself as you cannot let resin level on a canvas that is bigger than about 60x 60cm as it will just pool in the middle. So for larger paintings it is necessary to use a wooden block frame or something similar. These block frames do require sizing and sealing so that will be a bit of extra work on top before the painting is even started! I’m looking forward to doing that commission though and seeing how it comes out.

Exhibition invitations are still coming in and I am adding them to the events section of the website.

I’ve had a lot of interest in black/white/grey/silver colour schemes so have been doing some of those recently. This is a recent commission that just went to it’s new home.

If you are interested in a commission or exiting artwork then drop me a line via my contact page or else you can see prices here.

2020 has kicked off and I think it is good to start the new year by making a few changes and one of those is to start documenting what I am up to in a blog. I may not add things very often but who knows, it might be of interest to people to read what I am up to!

Things do generally quieten down a bit in the winter with the majority of events I take part in being in spring and summer. There have been a few things going on recently which means that things have not come to a complete stop. I have some paintings in an exhibition in Halesworth at the New Cut which ends next week – it’s a really nice display of work with some really big paintings there in the cafe which make me want to size things up a bit! I went to the opening event and bumped into a few fellow artists there which was nice.

I also have a painting up in an exhibition in Pakefield at Ferini Gallery as part of the Suffolk Open Studios winter exhibition which ends in a couple of weeks.

I was disappointed not to get anything accepted into the Colchester Art Society exhibition before Christmas with some feedback being that paint pouring is a bit common and it sells well online. I have to say I disagree with the latter point as the paintings with resin on look sooo much better in the flesh (I can never get photos to do the paintings justice) and also it was a bit frustrating as I have been developing this technique in various forms since around 2006 so feel like I am one of the old school in fluid acrylics!

I have had a few commissions ongoing too since late last year so have been working on getting those done. It’s quite difficult to do commissions in this medium as the paint often has ideas of its own and you can only guide it a certain amount and the rest is a little bit out of your control!

Talking of Suffolk Open Studios, as the website administrator I have had a fair bit of work to do on that as the application process is now open for artists to open their studios in June 2020. I have decided not to open my studio this year for various reasons (my studio is quite small so last year I shared with Emma Garnham which was great but she is having to move studio this year) so I am just going to be an associate member this year but it is a great way to network with other artists and hear about opportunities.

I’ve just had the forms through for the Needham Market exhibition which takes part at Easter so I will be taking part in that as that has often been a good venue for me, plus I must get some more greeting cards done for it.

As an artist, I often go through stages of what I want to paint and although I will still be doing more wave type paintings this year, I am also planning to go back to doing some abstract textured paintings. In addition to having some ideas on paintings in that style, I also have some canvases that I have used for fluid acrylic paintings that have not worked, that I need to restretch the canvas on, and those won’t be suitable for fluid paintings as the canvas won’t be taut enough, so I can use those for textured ones.

Last year I had more exhibitions than ever that I took part in and this year is likely to be no different so I’ll need to make sure I start painting soon as I still haven’t got as much stock as I would like since selling a large number of paintings at Art on the Prom last September.