Blog

As I move towards becoming a full time artist my experience earlier this year of running independent workshops in Cornwall has really helped me realise that there are opportunities out there to do what you love doing, exploring new places and meeting and working with like minded people.

Some more mini big skies heading to the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle. Ten brand spanking new paintings all inspired by the ever changing weather up here in the North of England. Each one is finished with a bespoke St Ives style frame which has been hand painted with Little Green Slaked Lime.

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new collection of work for the Hope Gallery in Hebden Bridge. There was a clear brief to create some bright pieces for her gallery. As a painter who leans more towards the darker side of the colour range I did wonder whether I would be able to pull this off, especially as it was the middle of winter and quite frankly I do like my clouds of doom!

In January 2021 lockdown was creating havoc with my schedule and I would find that I wouldn’t leave the house for 3-4 days and be constantly glued to my computer screen. I decided I needed another project which would give me some structure and this coincided with the start of the 100 day project which was running on Instagram.

Lockdown for me meant very little painting... in fact almost no painting at all for 3 months. So when I eventually got round to thinking about doing something this painting literally fell out of my head!

I have absolutely loved being back in the studio painting and this time I have been experimenting with scale and surface. For the last 3 years I have been mainly painting with cold wax on a smaller scale and on paper. I love working on the paper but you can only scale up so far with work that has to be behind glass, unless of course you fix the paper to the board and well I know that will just go terribly wrong for me.