Finding a new way...

At the beginning of this year I had no work for sale in my own name. I forget that sometimes.
In January I made the decision I'd been working up to for ages- to give up trying to sell the work which is now wrapped and archived from the two years I'd painted under a different name. If you want to see my old blog to see why I used a different name and where it all went wrong click here, but you need to be over 18...

If not, here's one of the two pieces I've stolen from that portfolio and now claim as my own. It was painted in January and I only painted one more piece before I decided to concentrate on work which is easier to exhibit and less controversial. I'll still work on them occasionally because I love them and I spent a lot of time and work with models producing some great images, some of which still demand to be painted.


Because I jumped so suddenly, I had no idea what my work would be like. And quite honestly, when I look at it, it's not what I thought it would be at all! I do love painting flowers, they give me a lot of the same feelings I had painting nudes, but I didn't really think I'd be painting  some of the landscapes which are on the walls drying all around me.

My work on the left, Claire's on the right

Today I took my work to art on the railings in Norwich with my talented friend Claire Cansick, and when I put it up and stood back to look at it I realised I need a new direction. At least A direction, my work is all over the place in style and subject. The paintings I have in my head don't look like the paintings I've been doing. I need to narrow the gap between what I like to look at and what comes out of my paintbrush. I guess it won't be easy at first but I need to get back to basics, have some fun with paint and see what happens.

I also need to work on my sales skills. Hiding behind Claire isn't really working

Watch this space :)

Doing what comes naturally

My portfolio is irritatingly random. If you take into account all my work available to buy, it makes for a less than homogenous collection. House numbers, cards, aceo collectables and a huge range of sizes and subjects of painting done over many years. They appear all over the internet, and in local craft fairs and exhibitions.

It's difficult to keep a balance between what I find easy, what I like looking at and what I think will sell. I don't have the luxury of doing this for fun so it's never far from my mind.

My natural painting style is very recognisable in my larger work. I often start work with a strong idea of how I  want a painting to look, but it gets hijacked by my dominant painting style. Now and again I'm really happy with a piece of work and it's just how I imagined it.

When I began this painting, I had a set of photographs from salhouse broad to work from. I try really hard not to use my hipstamatic iphone camera as I know it's a lazy way of producing images to work from but I've isolated what it is that I really like about the pictures and it's quite a simple thing. It's the border around the picture- like old style photos. If you look through my sketchbooks you'll see that I draw little frames around everything. Not just for compositional reasons but because I like to see them contained. There's just something wonderful to me about a frame, I think I've struggled a lot with the current vogue for painted edge canvases. Slightly better for me if I paint the edges black or in a complementary colour because if you look from an angle the image is better contained.

In this painting I've taken advantage of the filters applied in the software and after a bit of colour adjustment (I'm battling an addiction to blue- all my landscapes want to be in blue and turquoise with a hint of pale ochre) I started with something to work from which almost already appeared to have a frame, without just drawing a line near the edge of the canvas and creating a border. Now it's really got an extra level of nostalgic feeling to it, it reminds me of dreams, and of those bizarre arcade machines I was obsessed with as a child where you paid 1p to look through a pinhole into a box where some curous and often disturbing scene would take place in a scale model toy setup. We were so easily entertained years ago!

I'm going to try really hard not to battle against my natural painting style and just see what happens. Maybe I'll end up with a collection of work which makes sense!

When it's dry it'll be for sale at Affordable British Art