Your Own Personal Tree Pics!

Do you have a special tree in your life? Maybe a favourite tree that you love to watch through the turning of the seasons? A memorial tree that’s been planted for a loved one or a pet? A particularly shady tree in your local park that you like to read under on a hot day? Or a tree from your childhood that you used to climb or have a treehouse in? (If you had a treehouse, I’m really jealous!)

My favourite tree is in the cemetery across the road from my flat. I’ve admired it for years - my bus route into Nottingham city centre used to take me past it - and now I live close by so I’ve got to know it in person. I’m ashamed to say I don’t even know what it is - I’m thinking apple or cherry because of the blossom, I really should find out. But it’s such a beautiful shape and of course when the blossom’s out it’s just glorious.

I’ve been making some paintings on paper recently using photographs of tree silhouettes which I convert to black and white and transfer onto painted backgrounds - and I thought it might be a nice idea to offer personalised paintings using your photograph of a special or favourite tree. This is the kind of thing I mean.

What I’d need from you would be a clear picture of your tree against the sky, either with leaves or without - blossom however won’t work, because when I convert the photo to black and white the flowers just get lost. You can send me the photo before making any commitment so I can test it out in black and white. You’d then choose the colour palette for your background (I can accommodate any colour choice, it just needs to be light enough for the tree to stand out on ie not dark blue or black or brown!) The painting will be presented in an off-white A4 mount (see photos below) and will cost £55. HOWEVER!! If you’re one of the first 5 people to order a personal tree pic then you’ll get it for the very special introductory price of £45! Send me a message if this is something you’d like :)

Introducing....... theprintspace!

I thought I’d just tell you some things about the print company who create my limited edition prints and frames. I get that buying a print online can feel like a bit of a risky business, especially if it’s framed - you don’t know if what arrives at your door is going to be up to scratch (and not scratched!) 

theprintspace was recommended to me by a friend whose judgement in such matters I trust implicitly. I ordered a sample print and was really, really impressed with the quality of the print, the paper, the packaging AND the super-speedy dispatch time! And trust me, I’m pretty fussy!

The prints I sell are giclée prints which basically means a high quality archival inkjet print (bonus fact - giclée is pronounced ‘jee-klay’ with a soft ‘j’. It comes from the French verb ‘to spray’)

The paper I use is made by Hahnemühle who produce excellent quality archival, acid-free art papers. It’s just slightly off-white and is lightly textured with a matt finish. You can get an idea of how it looks in the photo below.

Image taken from theprintspace.co.uk

The inks used for the prints are wayyyyy better than anything you’d use in a home printer - the printers at theprintspace use 11 separate ink cartridges which make for excellent colour reproduction and quality. Also, they’re guaranteed to last for decades (80 years in daylight, 200 in the dark!) 

The frames that your prints come in are made from solid wood from sustainable sources - theprintspace don’t use veneers, MDF or any other type of reconstituted materials. So you can be assured that your frame is of the best quality and will look fabulous on your wall! Talking of which, they come fitted with hanging hardware, so no faffing around trying to put wire on the back or whatever! The images below are taken from theprintspace.co.uk showing the two options I have for my prints - black frame/white mount and oak frame/white mount.

Extra doubleplusgood stuff

I didn’t know this when I first was introduced to theprintspace but I was delighted to discover that they are the UK’s first fully carbon neutral fine art printing service. Fantastic! AND they also support the World Land Trust via their print referral scheme*. In the words of Sir David Attenborough “the money that is given to the World Land Trust, in my estimation has more effect on the wild world than almost anything I can think of”. So an absolute win/win in my book, and hopefully in yours!

*If you want to try theprintspace for yourself, gimme a shout and I’ll send you a referral code. You’ll receive 50% off your first order (up to £25 discount). And for each referral theprintspace will purchase 25m square of land via the World Land Trust - so we can all feel bloomin’ marvellous!

If there’s anything else you’d like to know please drop me a line. In the meantime, check out my prints!

Not Such A New Year Now!

No, I’m not going to do any of that ‘I’m gonna blog every week’ shit because you know I won’t and I know I won’t so….

I just thought I’d share a social media post I did on Jan 1st which seemed to resonate with a lot of people in a really lovely way.

Face Off

Last time I wrote, I thought I’d made a breakthrough, but I was wrong. Well, not entirely wrong - it was a shift, but not necessarily in the right direction. So it was still part of the journey, and as artists we are always on a journey, there is no magical destination we reach where we say ‘right! That’s it! I’m here!’ After another period of flux and uncertainty, which I forget the details of now, I had a ‘real’ breakthrough and this one led me to where I am now, which is a much more settled place where I’m happy with the work I’m doing and the direction it’s going in.

The turning point, regrettably perhaps, involved inebriation. As per my previous post, I was feeling frustrated and like I’d boxed myself in. I was exhorting myself to ‘paint the fucking plant’. Well, it turns out that painting fucking plants wasn’t where it was at. And I discovered this one (drunken) night when I was in my studio, annoyed with all the faces staring at me from the walls - and in a fit of irritation I painted out the features in all those faces. And hey presto! Just like that it all felt so much better. I’d been subconsciously scrapping with those features, and I didn’t realise it. I’m still not entirely clear on why they were bothering me so much. Somehow they made my heart sink. I think partly they reminded me too much of work I’d done in the past and I wanted to move on from that (not that there was anything wrong with it, it just belonged to then, not now. And partly they were, I think, too - obvious? Too directive? Something like that. I enjoyed the enigma, the ambiguity that resulted from obliterating the features.

I feel now like I’ve opened up a channel of exploration which fits me better than any I’ve pursued for some time - in fact, actually, I’ve returned to my core interest in human psychology, to give it its widest definition. I’m not sure why I veered from this path - I think in part it was to do with learning how to express myself in paint, because even though I’ve always painted, on and off, I’ve never worked solely in paint and I’ve had a lot to learn. I remember when I was (briefly) a European Studies student at the University of Hull, I was studying Dutch (they made me, I wanted to do German!) - and we went on a month long trip to a language school in Ghent. We were supposed to speak Dutch all the time. I felt very keenly that I couldn’t express myself properly, I couldn’t be my true self, because I didn’t know the language well enough. I wonder if it’s been a bit like that with the painting?

At the moment I’m nearing the conclusion of a new body of work which I’m going to be taking to Manchester Art Fair (17th - 19th November). It’s been very satisfying, especially now I’ve got a lot of the work framed and can see how it’s all going to look together. I’m really looking forward to sharing this new work with a new audience. If you want to come to the art fair, I’ve free tickets up for grabs! Just drop me an email and I can send you a link.

Until next time!

Paint The Fucking Plant!

I'm almost embarrassed to be here once more saying 'hey, my work has changed again!' But such is the nature of painting, it's an ongoing process of learning and developing, seeking out that which feels authentic and pleasing and enjoyable – because what's the point of painting stuff you don't enjoy?!

In my last post I was talking about how I'd arrived at the idea of painting faces and figures, a sort of resurrection of themes from my past. And I really got into it! I worked on a series of panels, a couple of canvases, and was for the most part happy with them. They were united by a general sense of obstruction and a lack of communication, of being boxed in, trapped. One particular piece I was working on really started to bother me. I couldn't make it work in a way that pleased me. I liked elements of it, could appreciate it on an aesthetic level in some ways, but I guess it just left me a bit cold. I talked to it, asked it what it wanted! And it had no answers for me. I felt a sort of mental blankness – like there was maybe something going on underneath but there was this concrete slab on top of it all.

The troublesome painting.

And then I had a dream! I'd been lying in bed thinking about my work, feeling a bit grim about it, but a chink of light in the gloom appeared before I fell asleep. In the dream (I'll summarise, I don't want to send you to sleep) I was in a big German train station looking for the train to Berlin. I couldn't find it for love nor money, and I couldn't understand the signs even though I'm familiar with the language. Eventually I just got on a random train, in the hope that it was going to Berlin. It was hugely crowded, there was a woman practically sitting on my lap. It dawned on me at this point that I should have asked someone where the train was going – so I asked someone and no, it wasn’t going to Berlin. We'd just stopped at the first station so I pushed my way through all the people and leapt off the train, thinking I'd make my way back to the original station and start again but I couldn't remember the name of it and none of the apps on my phone could help me.

I shared this dream on Facebook and when I read it back the line 'I couldn't understand the signs even though I'm familiar with the language' jumped out at me. Oh, the language is art! This is about my work! A friend suggested that maybe getting on that wrong train was about going in the wrong direction with my work and it felt so absolutely right. The wrong direction, getting hopelessly lost....yup! I took this enlightenment into the studio with me the next day, and had a bit of an epiphany.

I'd put the troublesome painting to one side and picked up another that was in its very early stages. There was a face filling most of the board and I caught myself thinking 'right, how am I going to decorate this face?' Aarghh! No! That's when I realised I'd fallen into a trap I'd made for myself, which was something along the lines of 'I paint people. This is what I do'. In exactly the same way that previously I decided I was an 'abstract landscape painter' and I had to break out of that box. And again with 'I paint abstracts' which led me up another blind alley. These portraits I'd been doing, which I realised were self-portraits in the sense that they illustrated a kind of frustration with my life – they were actually paintings about themselves! Sort of like the snake swallowing its own tail, I'd painted portraits of myself feeling boxed in by the very thing I was painting.

I hastily painted over the early-stages face, feeling great relief as I did so. An image of a plant popped into my head and I just thought 'why not paint a plant?' So I painted a rough approximation of a plant. I put words on it. I had fun with it. I just worked intuitively which is how I work best. I think going down the 'figurative' route was an attempt to bring more meaning into my work, to be 'serious' and have serious ideas behind it. I even tried to apply my paint more seriously! Which is absolutely all well and good, if it feels right. But it didn't. I think I desperately wanted it to feel right, for the uncertainty I've been feeling about my work for some time to be over – to feel happy and confident again about what I was doing. But deciding that 'I paint people' immediately limited me and very quickly it started to become forced and formulaic.

It’s very liberating writing on the wall!

This whole process and the 'aha!' moment has left me in a place where I no longer feel blank. I feel reconnected with myself, with the raw energy of the creativity that I'm harbouring inside me. I am divesting myself of the pressure to label myself. I am process-led, at the end of the day. The ideas will take care of themselves. I'm giving myself permission to paint the fucking plant!

Face To Face

It's a bit ironic that almost exactly a year ago I was writing about a change of direction – and here I am, about to write about yet another change of direction! Although to be honest this change started to occur towards the end of last year. From this vantage point, 2022 feels like a bit of a pig's ear of a year. It wasn't the best. I didn't actually make very much work, and after creating a series of abstracts in the summer I really didn't do much at all. I got a bit lost. I just didn't know what I wanted to paint. It was bloody awful. I had a sense of dissatisfaction with my work, that it was lacking something. I didn't know what to say about it. So many times I thought 'that's it. I'm fucked. This is over for me'. I just couldn't imagine how things were going to get better. And of course the longer this went on, the more my confidence diminished and the worse I felt. It was profoundly uncomfortable. Why did I feel this way? I think we always, as artists, go through periods like this but what exacerbated things for me was a year of menopause-related mood swings, frequently plunging into black, sometimes suicidal moods, which had no pattern to them, no way of knowing when they'd happen or how long they'd last. So everything was just on such shaky ground, I didn't feel I knew who I was half the time. And of course, so much shit going down nationally and globally.

At some point towards the end of the year I started painting faces on small pieces of board. I'd had an inkling that I might want to revisit faces and figures (my work centred on figures for over 20 years, only stopping when I began painting in 2018). I had this nagging feeling that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to say in my work without them but I was slightly resistant to the idea too because I didn't want to go back over old ground. To begin with I felt frustrated by the fact that my faces looked exactly the same as they always did! You might think well, that's okay, isn't it? What's wrong with that?! But you know when you've got this thing tugging at your coat-tails, you can't ignore it. I suppose I wanted to feel like I'd progressed in some obvious way. I wanted it to look like I'd progressed. Anyway, I pushed myself to try different ways of doing the faces – using my left hand, using long brushes, deliberately making them different. In the end though, they just look like my faces because, well, that's my style! So I've calmed down a bit and accepted this fact, and got on with the painting. It gave me a buzz, painting these people, which I was massively grateful for because I thought I’d never feel it again. And I had the beginnings of a new path at last, I had somewhere to go.

When I was freezing my arse off on Exeter Christmas Market for nearly four weeks in November/December last year (sometimes I sell Viking drinking horns for a friend. Don’t ask.) some days were incredibly slow, so I did a bit of sketching, further exploring the idea of faces and also how I could blend them with text. I love words in themselves, doing what they’re supposed to do, but I also love how they can be used in a decorative way, the visual appeal to me is very strong. In particular, scratchy pen and ink writing, and stencilled or block printed letters. My desire to use text with faces and figures swings me back to some of my later embroidered pieces where I was doing a very similar thing. It wasn’t a deliberate decision, more of a subconscious pull - which is a gratifying thing, because it tells me that it’s something I need to do, that I’m not finished with that particular theme. Rather than feeling like I’ve come full circle though, I feel I’ve just looped back to pick up something that I left by the roadside for a while, and I’m now carrying that forward with the other things I’ve learnt along the way. More about where this is leading me next time!

New year, new me?

Nah. I really don't believe in all that. Putting massive pressure on yourself to be 'better' and subsequently making yourself feel really shitty because you 'fail'. No thanks. Been there and done that, like most people. No more, thank you very much. I can however get down with the idea of intentions. Like, one of my intentions for 2023 is to, I don't know, be more experimental with my cooking (it is, actually). I'm not saying to myself 'I am going to cook one new dish every week for the whole year and if I don't then I'm a total loser'. But just as a general thing, I will gently encourage myself to try some new stuff.

Anyway, another of my intentions for this year is simply to write more. I like writing. I am told that I'm good at it and people enjoy reading what I've written. Yet somehow (as you'll see from the date of my last blog post) I don’t actually get round to doing it very often. When it comes to writing, I find the mere thought of putting down all the words that are required to convey a thought or an idea quite overwhelming. It's not the physical effort, it just seems such a monumental task (how on earth do people write novels?!) I'll be into, say, the second paragraph (yes, exactly here!) and I'm thinking 'good grief, I haven't even said any of the things I came here to say! There's such a long way to go!' And that makes me feel quite weary. Maybe it's a remembered state from the last time I really wrote anything of any length which would be A-levels – and that was a particularly shitty time in my life. (Actually I just had another thought about this – I feel the same about painting sometimes and it isn't to do with how far I have to go, but the sheer number of options that are available! Infinite! The same with words – there are infinite possibilities – maybe it's that that I find overwhelming).

So anyway, I guess the thing to do is to just keep writing, and it will get easier, and less overwhelming. Just sort of burrow into it, get submerged, stop thinking about the end point – be mindful, is I suppose what I'm saying. And I've just had a little chat with myself, and decided that ok, this post can just be about the writing because it's gone off in that direction, and I don't have to strive to cover everything that I'd originally intended to. It's good to let these things flow, take their own path. It was going to be about my painting (eventually) but that can be for next time. In any case, the two are linked (read on!)

Part of what I want to cultivate for myself is a free flowing of ideas, a kind of cerebral lubrication that will help me with my art, with ideas, creativity, and mental health. I know I could write it in a journal, keep it to myself, not subject you poor buggers to it – but a large part of the writing thing is to do with the art thing. It feels like a missing piece, something that will make my creative practice fuller, more substantial and I want to embrace that. I haven't really written around my art since I was working with machine embroidery around 15 years ago. That's the last time I was really making expressive as opposed to ideas-based art, so I guess that makes sense. Coming up with funny captions for greetings cards didn't really require any sort of deep thinking.

It's that depth that I'm after – I've been feeling for quite some time now that I'm just sort of skimming along the surface – almost like I'm avoiding getting really engaged with it. I think partly this has been to do with that transition from - let's call it design – to painting. About having been trying to find my way with painting, and find my voice, but not really settling in a place where I want to stop skimming, and dive underneath to explore what's there.

So (and I apologise if you're one of those people that hates sentences starting with 'so', but I ain't gonna stop!) (also, my English teacher told me never to start sentences with 'and', but I like doing that too. I just don't care!!) - so, I'll be showing up here regularly this year, I'm not going to say once a month or whatever, that'll just scare me off. Regularly is fine. Sometimes there will be pictures, sometimes not. And thank you to Sam who inadvertently gave me the kick up the arse I needed to do this. Cheers Sam!

A Change Of Direction

A big change happened in my work recently and it threw me off kilter for a while. The last paintings I'd done were towards the end of 2021 and I was really excited about the work I was doing - 'yes! This is it!' It was a venture in a new direction, painting on a black background and using lots of texture – fruit netting, thread, plaster of Paris – and I was really into it, in fact really looking forward to getting back to doing some more, venturing further down that road – and then suddenly I came to a screeching halt.

I was working away for five weeks before Christmas, on a Christmas market in Exeter, it was cold and the hours were long, and I was working 7 days a week – and then of course Christmas, and suddenly it's January and I'm not ready for the new year, still knackered from working away. I revisited the work I’d done in late 2021 and found that I’d lost all enthusiasm for it. I suddenly lost all sense of knowing what I was doing, which was painful and scary. Whilst feeling unable to work I spent a lot of time sorting out my studio which felt crowded and chaotic – I was yearning for clarity and space.

I had several panels primed and ready to go hanging on my wall. I took those down. I took all my finished artwork off the walls. Eventually I had a work space that, minus a huge whiteboard and a huge table, now felt blissfully spacious – room to whirl around with my arms outstretched, or indeed swing a cat, if I had a cat to swing. Still no great desire to paint though, I didn't know what to paint. I had this sense that I wanted to be looser, more expressive, more spontaneous. I felt like I always ended up killing the energy in my paintings and overworked them. Designed them too much. That's not to say that I was unhappy with them but just always this sense that there was something more elemental I needed to uncover, dig out – or conversely, to not cover, to leave bare. And ultimately something that felt truer to me.

In the end, knowing that I had to at least do something, I did the only thing I felt I could stomach which was to take a large piece of cartridge paper – I had just one, that I'd had for years – nail it to the wall, and make big sweeping looping shapes in charcoal. That was what I saw in my mind. Which is what I did, and then I added some paint, just a couple of colours – I just let myself get involved in it, followed my instinct, didn't worry about the charcoal mixing with the paint. To achieve this state it's almost like you have to switch off the highest receptors in your brain and operate at a sub-optimum level. A kind of sinking under. Or letting your eyes go out of focus, almost. A surrendering of yourself to the painting. It's hard, really hard to get into that unthinking state, but when you do it's blissful. I think it gets easier with practice.

So I had this painting that was really expressive and honest, and people responded really positively to it, and I thought yes! This is it! (yes, again. How many of these moments we have in our lives as artists!) But it really felt like I was a lot closer to my own truth than I had been for some time. Doing this painting suddenly gave me a starting point, a direction. I immediately ordered a pack of 50 sheets of A1 cartridge paper. My plan was to pin as many sheets up around my studio as I could, and just go for it in that unthinking state, using just paint and pastel, moving from one to the other, zigzagging across my (blissfully empty!) room – and when I found I was starting to think, I stopped. Stopping is a very hard thing to do in a painting, and requires some courage! You are declaring that this is enough, almost daring anyone to suggest otherwise – and resisting your twitchy-fingered desire to keep adding, keep refining. Working on paper is very liberating, there’s not such a feeling of preciousness about it.

I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with these pieces, and I was trying not to think about that, which is difficult when art is your living. It turned out though that some of the pieces I really liked, and I decided to put them out there into the world – this was a very insecure time for me! It's so hard to do something completely different to what you were doing before, and are really pleased with, and to offer it up for judgement, or in today's parlance 'likes' (or the lack thereof). Ultimately however this work's been really well received (you can see them on my shop page here) and I've settled into the idea of it, and am excited about where it'll take me. There's still some conflict for me though – more of which next time!

The Cacophony Of Ages

In March this year I was delighted to be invited to show some paintings with the Pyramid Gallery in York, UK. I have a long history with this lovely gallery - they used to exhibit my machine embroidered pieces back in the 90s and they were good enough to try out some of my earliest abstract paintings a couple of years ago. Since then my work has developed a lot and Fiona, the gallery’s assistant manager had been following my progress on Instagram and asked me if I’d like to have a solo show with them. Of course I jumped at the chance, especially given the lack of opportunities to show work lately. You just can’t replace seeing art in the flesh!

A friend of mine visited the gallery last week and took these fab photos of the show and I’ve written a short piece about the work which you can read below. The Cacophony Of Ages is on until July 4th 2021.

‘The title for this exhibition came from a painting that I did last year but decided not to include in the exhibition as it didn't quite fit. 'The Cacophany Of Ages' is really just a fancy way of saying 'the noise of history'. I felt that it captured the essence of what I was trying to convey in this body of work which, loosely speaking, is a sense of the history of stories and conversations that our lives are built on.

I always work intuitively in that I don't have a specific idea that I'm working towards when I start a piece. There might be a vague idea like 'I want this one to have big sky' or 'I'd like to use yellow in this one' but beyond that anything can happen. Having said that there are obviously certain elements that I use consciously in every piece and that give the paintings cohesion as a body of work, in this case buildings or other man-made structures.

I've been putting buildings in my paintings for a while now – initially I was painting purely abstract but I started to feel dissatisfied with the lack of any kind of narrative. My earlier paintings started to have a lot of chimney-like structures in them and this is what led to the idea of using photos of real buildings. The roots of this idea, I realised, are in the 'moorland and mill chimneys' landscape of my childhood in Rochdale, Lancashire. I'm drawn to all sorts of architecture – industrial, derelict, domestic, coastal – and on reflection I think the main attraction is about the kind of shapes they make against the sky. It's important to me to use pictures that I take myself (apart from one photo of a factory near Newcastle that was taken by a friend) because they're an important part of the story and I want it to be entirely my story. All the photos I've used in this collection are taken in Nottingham, Sheffield, Norfolk and Northumberland. I either collage the printed pictures onto the painting, or use a photo transfer gel.

The text I use in my work isn't intended to mean anything but I like the way that it draws the viewer in – most people will want to try and decipher what it says (I would!) Some words are discernible but they are generally waffle and nonsense – streams of consciousness, lyrics from a song I'm listening to whilst painting. For me they give that sense of story, of narrative, and visually evoke the feel of graffiti or words scratched into walls or wood which I liken to modern day cave paintings. Also, simply, I like the way they look!

I use a lot of different media in my paintings and am constantly trying new ways of adding colour or creating texture. This helps to keep me engaged and interested in the work I'm doing, and it adds to the interest of the surface. I use collage often, usually painted or printed tissue paper and lately pieces of old dressmaking pattern which give the surprising contrast of printed lines, words and arrows. Often when I'm evaluating a piece I'll say to myself 'is it interesting enough?' I want the viewer to have plenty to look at, both the obvious and the subtle details - textures that you can only see in a certain light, metal leaf that catches the eye at a particular angle. I also relish the creation of enigma in my paintings, things to get people thinking. It doesn't matter what conclusion each individual comes to – for me that's the beauty of abstract work, it allows the viewer to tell their own story.