… I’m still reeling from the speed at which everything has been happening recently and so blogs have been coming slowly so I thought I would recap and say a very big ‘Thank You’ to everyone who supported and visited the Journey exhibition over at G90 Finsbury park and particularly Mick and Michelle who put in all the hard work making sure everyone who visited was well looked after.  It was a real pleasure to work with Gallery 90 and I am looking forward to showing work with them again in the future.  Thanks also to those people who have collected and invested in originals of my work and to those who have also bought prints, it has been an amazing year and I am very grateful that I have been given the opportunity to work full time as an artist.

So what next… well hot on the heels of the Journey Exhibition, I have been invited by Debut Contemporary in Notting Hill to submit works for their winter exhibition which opens tomorrow night. 7th Dec.

It is an honour to have been selected from over a thousand artists, and to not only show work with this gallery but to get experience from their excellent workshops which give artists the opportunity to gain industry experience through introductions to experts from a number of fields including curators, practicing artists, publicists and collectors.  The program began earlier today with the opportunity to present an ‘elevator’ style pitch about yourself as an artist.  Public speaking isn’t something I’ve ever been fond of and with a camera in the mix even less so but it didn’t go too badly!  It was a great opportunity also to meet the other artists who will be showing at Debut from Tomorrow night.

So to plan the direction of work over the coming year… I have had several slight changes of direction and experimentations over the last year but have mainly kept both thematic and stylistic elements which I hope identify the work as belonging to me.  Next years challenge will be to take the work in a new direction whilst still maintaining the elements and freedom of line which make the work so enjoyable to make

Another Place

There is a very fine balance in the work between complete freedom, and the constraints put on the work by figurative elements.  A particular piece which I think achieved this was ‘Another Place’ created just before the journey exhibition.  Following on from the works ‘somewhere’ and ‘somewhere else’ the piece focuses on that moment where we allow ourselves to delve inside our unconscious mind, to drift and yet still have some lucid recollection of events, or an awareness of self.  In this respect ‘Another Place’ is, in effect, a drawing of my drawing process – it calls upon personal symbols and shapes important to me and transposes them alongside an image of a daydreaming figure.  The model reference for this piece is photographer Lisa Stefaniak lisastefaniak.com I asked Lisa if I could reference images from a series of photographs she had taken each day over a period of one year.  There is something about the set which gives this feeling of elsewhere – a daydream or a longing and this is what I am trying to capture through a sense of abandonment in drawing.

You can purchase a ltd ed print of this piece here

Strength

Another piece which has just been released as a print is Strength.

Strength was a piece created in 2011 in response to the disastrous earthquake in Japan, it was a piece about human resolve and also about the terrifying force of nature.  The concept of the piece is fairly simple A woman stands resilient against the force of the plant roots which try to break apart her figure.  It focuses on the beauty and delicacy of nature and how a tiny flower will break through the toughest of grounds and overcome the harshest surroundings in order to survive

The print has been produced by Fine Art Publishers Harwood King who are well known for their creation of prints for artists such as Dan Baldwin, Hush, Henrik Simonsen, and Andrew McAttee
Details of the print (varnish layers and gold leaf treatments) can be found on Etsy where the first editions are currently for sale.

Strength Ltd ed print available for sale here

images below are actual pictures of the print from Harwood King