My Own Art Update

What with writing books, blogs and being on the Committee of a large local Art Group my own art has been rather neglected these past years. Nevertheless, I do have some new pieces to show you. They are going into a group exhibition at the Refinery ArtSpace Gallery in Nelson, NZ.
(For those of you in the area, the opening is at 5.30pm until 7.00pm on 20th June 2021. The exhibition finishes at 2.00pm on 3 July.)

You may have noticed one of these pictures on my gallery pages but there are four new pieces you won’t have seen before.

I started this drawing some time back. I don’t remember when but probably about five years ago. It was nearly complete but needed some finishing touches. Most important were extensions to the background so those white mushrooms on the edges would stand out a little better.

Rebecca Bowater has kindly advised me that these little beauties are most likely ‘Coprinellus disseminatus’. Thank you Rebecca!

‘The Tree on the Hill’ is a pastel painting. Along with the Cloud Study further down, it began as an exercise at a workshop with visiting USA Pastel Tutor, Liz Haywood Sullivan. She’s a great teacher but in terms of immediate results, I’m hopeless at workshops. I take copious notes but usually, unlike everybody else, I normally don’t actually finish anything at the workshop. Often, as in this case, I barely got the under-painting down! For me, absorbing the teaching is more important on the day than creating a good piece of art. Besides, left on my own I can think more clearly about what I need to do to get the result I want.

As for the tree, it sits high on a hill down the road from our cottage. I’ve taken dozens of photos of it over the years and hope to do some more studies of it. I’ve nick named it the ‘Dancing Tree’ because of it’s crazy shape.

You may have noticed this little picture on the ‘Drawings’ page of my website. It too was the result of a pastel workshop exercise, this one back in 2016 with Stan Sperlak. He’s another great pastel teacher from the USA but with a very different style and I learned a lot from his bold strokes of the pastel stick. I certainly enjoyed painting this one. It was the last exercise of the day when we were let loose to decide what and how we wanted to finish with. I’d pretty much completed this little picture when Stan walked past, looked at it and gave it a nod and a grunt, presumably he approved.

This moody pastel also finally eventuated from Liz Haywood Sullivan’s workshop. It came from a photograph I had taken and yes, all those different kinds of clouds were there in that one piece of photographed sky!

‘Light in the Fir Forest’

I recently dug out this Watercolour, which was originally intended for an illustration in The Children of Gaia. In the end I chose a different composition for that job. I had done some under painting for this one back in the late 1980s/early 1990s and decided to finish it all these decades later! Watercolour isn’t a medium to be left unpractised for a long time, so this one proved something of a challenge, especially with needed alterations to the composition. Fortunately the paper I’d chosen is a hefty piece of textured Arches, my favourite French brand. It will stand a fair bit of patient correction.