The brochures are out, so it’s Somerset Artweeks time again – Open Studios 2018 are just around the corner! This year, at Spring Farm Arts there are old hands Me and Pam Martin, and, exhibiting at SAW for the first time ever, Paul Larner will be at the Glassworks.
…always gives me a problem. I always want to do more than I’ve got the time to do stuff and I’ve always got more stuff than I’ll ever use. So Last month when we were lucky enough to be staying in a Cotswold Cottage with loads of potential drawings on the spot. I tried to develop a simpler and, dare I say it, more disciplined approach.
I was armed only with a tiny paintbox , a mediumish kind of brush and a pot of water (not a collection of two dozen tubes of paint and a massive palette), a stick of g.raphite and a stick of Derwent graphitone which is water soluble.
Right! I said: 10 minutes’ drawing, ten minutes’ sloshing some washes around, and ten minutes’ stengthening the lines and tones. Here are some results:
And I resisted the temptation to carry on fiddling. My next effort, further afield, didn’t stand up too well to the ‘your time is up’ approach – more ambitious I suppose:
Anyway, when I got home I went out on the nature reserve (Shapwick Heath) and had another go. I painted the cattle first, as they were on the move, and by the time the half-hour was up, they were nowhere to be seen!
Anyway, an approach worth persisting with, I think. A race against the clock is a great aid to simplification!
The artist’s year is a bit of a muddle. Hard to get outside in the cold beginnings of the year but the two monthly magazines I draw for still need something seasonal to put on their pages. I scour old sketchbooks for inspiration. For February found a drawing of a hellebore and some ‘parked up’ wheelbarrows (which came in very useful later…)
Then for March there was the gift of the red super blue moon – not sure those adjectives are in the right order – from a quick early morning snapshot. And a few moments snatched outside the hall during one Wednesday morning Art Sessions gave me the rooftops.
The next task was more far-reaching: fill in the entry from for Somerset Art Weeks in September, and select an image. So I swiftly worked on a couple of animal pictures that might also serve as my Christmas card (even further away), some gorgeous tractor ruts and, yes, had another go at the wheelbarrows. Then I cropped them all to more or less the right size (tiny) for the brochure and conducted a poll in the pub and the Art Group for the most effective:
Yes – the wheelbarrows won! And meanwhile, that’s a start made on the 2019 Calendar. Where did that year go?
November has come and gone – not without artistic activity but it went unrecorded.
I’ve been busy having coasters made, featuring some of my paintings.
I’m a bit ambivalent about the point of coasters but having sold all my calendars I was looking for another product for our current event: Creative Christmas at Moorlinch.
So here we are, mince pies and wine at the ready, open for business!
That’s what the last day of Somerset Art Weeks always feels like. We’ve had over 400 visitors on which I’ve deployed my opening gambit ‘Hello, come in, I’m Anne and these are my paintings’ (the latter being marginally more obvious then the former) This is followed by a choice from a short list: 1) Have you come far? 2) Are you doing the rounds? and 3) Do you paint ? I’m probably not alone in preferring the answer to question 3) to be in the negative!
And I’ve sold paintings, calendars (only 2 left) and cards. Here are some of pictures that are leaving home:
The fox as discussed in my previous blog is also going too.
My new venture into etchings has been quite successful too – excellent teaching by Jenny Graham to thank for that.
People often ask if I mind parting with my paintings. Er..No! Onwards…
My (nearly) last job before Somerset Art Weeks in about 10 days time was to create my 2017 Christmas card. I usually choose and animal image and this time I wanted to have a Fox.
We occasionally get a fox visiting the garden and I had a few images from this year when she came leaping over the stream in search of the fallen cherry plums.
None of her poses was quite right though, so I had to resort to the internet for a bit of help. I finally decided I wanted to concentrate on quite a close-up view of the head, but not too centrally placed, with room to suggest a snowy setting.
There are some lovely painterly pictures of foxes around so I had to start again several times as I was happy with the pose but not the painting. I was also deperate to avoid anything ‘cute’ (see a previous blog on this subject) so I carried on with rather a ‘zombie’ look until I was happier:
So here is the end product: 
Is that the correct spelling? Anyway, when I decided to commit to producing a 2018 calendar in time for Somerset Art Weeks I made the usual mistake of assuming that I would easily find 12 suitable seasonal works among my Oeuvre (spelling doubts again…)
Then I soon realised my calendar was as full of holes as a colander (spelling doubts now getting boring). So here are some of the new ones:
The title is my way of self-denying that I didn’t do a post in July ! I have been doing some painting, in particular a couple of commissions. One of them I delivered yesterday, only to realise today that I had forgotten to photograph it. Duh!
So here’s the other, which presented some difficulties, not least that it was a surprise present. I find secrecy in a little village like Moorlinch is tricky. Somebody is always going to spot you loitering with intent to paint in someone’s garden. That’s just the painting. Communication is also difficult when the intended (but unaware) recipient shares most forms of communication with the person who has asked you to do the painting so organising the project is problematic.
Anyway, here is Drysend Farm – an interesting name, and a very apt one as we saw in the floods of a few years ago when the vast lake on the Somerset Levels lapped a few metres away from this cottage:
I’m not a constant gardener. In fact my gardening career has been mainly aimed at reducing flowerbeds to grass and bushes to reduce the effort and time involved. And yet I love gardens and painting outdoors.
So I was gratified to find, a couple of weeks ago, three subjects in my garden just waiting to be painted for the Chandos Society of Artists Summer Exhibition currently showing at Hidestile Organic Farm at Goathurst near Bridgwater.
Let’s gloss over the fact that they were the only plants in flower : clematis, arum lilies and roses – they were all white so, even more satisfyingly, I could claim that they added up to a Theme of – er – White Flowers. All largely painted en plein air, too!
