2023 – A Summary of ups and downs

London, UK
Keighley, W Yorkshire

It has been a strange year, lots of things have interrupted my focus on art and In that time I have taken a slightly new approach to things. Over Christmas 2022 my husband took very poorly with COVID and was in hospital for a few weeks. He was back home at the end of January but never returned to work for some months and really there was not much time for painting. I did manage to complete the Launderette but that was it. In May I travelled to Lourdes once again on a pilgrimage and sketchbooked my way through a wonderful week – where time allowed (and there was not much). In July we lost a lovely Grandad kind of suddenly. We also had my youngest Childs graduation and a holiday. July was exhausting. In August I bought The Artists Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, I followed this for a few weeks and though I was not completely dedicated, it certainly triggered something. In November. With new energies, I decided I needed to sort a new workspace on a small desk. I recognised that I had not been painting because it is such upheaval setting things up, traipsing equipment from room to room each night. Also, my expectations had become too rigid, I had lost some of my spontaneity and freedom in my work, not everything can be a painting to such detail. I also feel that as soon as you focus on what people might want to buy, you make different decisions regarding work. I started to time myself for some 30 minute challenges and using a range of collage materials, together with some stamps, acrylic pens and markers created smaller mixed media work focusing on ghost and derelict buildings. These have been successful in that I am daily creating, excited but outcomes and enjoying things again. Its doable, good fun, engaging and new (for me) – there are no limits. I have started to post time lapses onto TikTok and picked up a small following. I have rediscovered some of the textures I once had. Here are some photos. I feel I have done a bit of rediscovery, this is still a weekends and evening activity, and it has to be fun. If you’re on tiktok feel welcome to follow.

Launderette Love

I finished this painting today, I started it a few weeks back. It is my first piece of 2023. A bit later than planned. I particularly loved painting the reflections and the signage. This was a gouache piece with pen on some watercolour paper. This is my only piece completed which contains a person.

It’s my favourite part of a painting, adding all the small details – this piece is up there with some of the largest I have painted but I am making a conscious effort to paint a bit smaller in the coming months. This has been a bit of a plan for a few weeks as I trial some new ideas out. We shall see.

New Year Thoughts

I have really struggles to find art time over the winter, I have great thoughts of doing things but the small things get in the way. It is just over a year since I started selling work. Here are some things I have learned:

  • Good quality prints are worth paying when creating prints to sell – I use Ginger The Art of Print in Warwick who provide a classic, great service and the quality of scanning and printing is exceptional. https://www.gingertheartofprint.co.uk
  • When selling work, small things add up; tubes to post, postage, film sleeves for prints, printing of paperwork – you must add all items up and be genuine to yourself when figuring out outgoings.
  • Tubes worked best for me in terms of postage. I think everyone develops their own way of rolling prints and packing them up – YOUTUBE is full of advice.
  • Frames make a huge difference – I always use Picture Frame Express, Coventry. They have just made me some tray frames for Ferodo and the Coventry Elephant. https://www.pictureframesexpress.co.uk
  • Don’t get despondent when potential customers discuss buying prints and then disappear. Sometimes they come back. Just the fact they they were interested is enough.
  • I had underestimated how positively comments made by others impacted. When viewers share their thoughts, feelings, memories about the place I have painted I feel a great sense of warmth, excitement and inspiration.
  • Does this earn enough to give up full time work? Not at the moment, my day job as a SENCO in a secondary school is demanding and exhausting and I cannot yet put more than spare time into this. But I won’t be doing that forever (it is unsustainable long term). So, I am planning this really, for a second career – in the future, where I can set myself up properly and dedicate my time and energy fully. How I long for those days.

So in 2023 I am aiming to complete some sketchbook work – I keep seeing books shared on Tiktok, completed with bold gouache, slightly naive studies (which I love) and am inspired to have a go myself. I also want to trial some biro and collage works, possibly some watercolour. I would love to loosen my style back up a bit without losing the attention to detail – this continues to be a battle. I’m having an inspired weekend so we shall see what happens.

Summer is over

I had all good intentions over the summer, to try to complete 1 painting a week. Unfortunately the weeks came and went and I managed just a few, but quite a lot of thinking.

Firstly, I finished this commission of Chandos Motors on Albany Road, Earlsdon, Coventry. This is a combination of buildings, some of which have now been demolished to make way for more flats. The railway house remains however. This was a special piece completed for my brother and included his car with my mum sat inside. She was raised in Earlsdon and once had her hair done in the upstairs of the railway house when it was a hairdressers many years ago.

I also started to think about spaces I am inspired by outside of Coventry. First up was Keighley Diesels on Bradford Road in Keighley. I pass this garage when visiting family. I love the lettering and reflections. It is a busy garage that is still going strong. I have other places to draw in Keighley too; there is a great newsagents just up the road and a few miles away there is Salts Mill, my favourite of all places up north.

This piece is a small study for a potential larger painting, it is the subway under the ring road from St Osburgs which brings you out by The Gatehouse Tavern. This is felt tip and pen on card, but I was impressed how the colours glowed. There is definite scope for a subway range.

So back to teaching next week, with more structure to the day it is likely I will manage to create more. I’m also creating a new workspace at home, so that is exciting. I hope you have had a good summer too!!

A love for buildings over time

I have always had a love of buildings. These photos of mini shrine type structures are work from my degree show back in 1994 and were based on the architectural forms I spotted on travels. My degree was in ceramics and I was drawn to fragile buildings, textures, small windows and doors, archways and chimneys. I loved the pale colours, roughness, preciousness. These were meant to be shrine like, they were lit with candles from the insides.

After this show, I stopped my own work and focused teaching art and starting a family. No time for anything really. I didn’t start my own art again for many years but remained attracted to similar textures and architectural forms. I had collated a small number of photos that I taken on trips abroad and these were my starting points. You can see how much more relaxed my drawing style was a few years back, I have no explanation of why it has changed and I find this quite annoying. In some paintings I would layer the canvas in different papers to create a base, never used a ruler and it didn’t seem to matter.

This went on and on really.

Then one day I came across the following https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/brutalism

Pecakucha is a way of presenting 20 slides in 20 minutes. It is a great way to share interesting information quickly. I watched this presentation by Emma Brooke and was instantly hooked on concrete – Brutalism. I started to appreciate my Coventry surroundings and the smoother shapes and concrete forms. I read books, researched architects, discovered places I had ignored. We are literally surrounded in Coventry by concrete. This new passion formed a big corner in the direction of my work and interests in general, an absolute new found appreciation for something that had surround me my entire life. As social medias grew I started to discover other contemporary artists who were drawn to the same sorts of places places.

This has slowly led to a fascination with urban areas and modernism in general; shopping centres, housing estates and urban landmarks. Influenced by the works of George Shaw, Mandy Payne, Jen Orpin, Michelle Heron and Reuben Colley. Rather than rough texture, now I am drawn to reflections and achieving accuracy. I love to try to paint chipboard, signage, graffiti, curtains in windows. I quite like to capture signs of life, without people so much, like a photograph but different. I would like to try to bring back some of the looser painting techniques from the 90’s an involve some texture but then find myself doing the complete opposite. It’s an ongoing battle.

Current work is a derelict Livingstone Baths and I’m already obsessed with achieving the last standing swimming pool tiles as accurately as I can. Gah!

Stirring Memories

By far the most exciting thing about completing a painting is the feedback I hear from people who share memories or any feeling the paining has evoked. These two paintings from the Coventry collection have received the most lovely and personal feedback over the last few months, some of the memories shared are so special and individual, it really does make a huge difference.

Creating a drawing or painting of an image is a really special way of attaching a memory to a place and a place to memory. As the artist you will look more closely at a scene if you have to draw it and start to take into account the small tiny elements that you may have ignored otherwise. If you really want a particular place to lodge in your memory, consider sketching it, just having a few minutes put aside to log the most crucial elements of a scene, maybe make a few notes. These paintings have taken much longer than a few minutes, but there are times when I use my sketchbook alongside my camera to capture scenes and the feelings associated in that place at that time.

A few years ago I was incredibly fortunate to be offered a place on a school trip to Auschwitz and Auschwitz Birkenau through the Holocaust Educational Trust. I decided to take a sketchbook with me, small enough to fit into a pocket and a few pens. Every mark that was made in that small sketchbook was made whilst listening to the voice of a Holocaust survivor who toured us around this desolate, hopeless place. Below there is a Tumblr link I shared following the visit with images of the sketches taken during this very special and memorable visit. You can see how fast some of the mark making was, sometimes walking as I sketched, looked and listened.

Sketching really helps, carrying a small sketchbook and pen with you is a great way to start helping you to look closer at the spaces we are surrounded with each day. Also amazing for wellbeing. I can guarantee that when you look back at the image, in days, weeks and years to come, you will instantly be back in that creative moment.

https://artysu.tumblr.com/post/142304011020/auschwitz-and-auschwitz-birkenau