Art Group exhibition

It’s my pleasure to invite you to the Orme Art Group Exhibition. It’s on Saturday and should be a good day. Orme Artists are a friendly group that meet regularly to paint and draw. We sometimes have guests who do workshops with us in subjects like printmaking, pastels and watercolours. We also book models occasionally and have plein air days out in the summer. So if you are near Newcastle under Lyme in Staffordshire on Saturday then you might enjoy coming along.

Town or City

Town/City full of buildings sketch. There are many historical buildings in Stoke on Trent but a lot of them are derelict and falling down. Where places like Manchester have had investment old buildings are refurbished and turned into apartments or restored to their former glory. Here in Stoke they languish, are bought up by out of town businesses that allow them to fall down, get broken into or in some cases have unexplained fires. Severs properties in the North of our city have had fires over the last few months. Is it wrong to be suspicious about that? I do wonder and worry that one of the most important areas of industrial and vernacular architecture is not being cared for. We could use the better properties even if we only keep the facades. But our local leaders seem hell bent on stripping back the past, losing a heritage that could be supported. You only have to look at Etruria Industrial Museum to see somewhere that has worked. But I despair for so much of our surroundings.

Members collage

This is another group collage that the Orme Art Group did during lock-down. We each did a part of this Picasso painting and then submitted them to one of the group to stitch them together. I can’t remember which bit was mine. It’s interesting because although we were copying from the original you can see different techniques for each artist and also different colours and tones. I really enjoyed doing these collaborations.

Doodle, drawing a line

Draw round anything with a thin pen and you get an interesting effect. It’s something I do occasionally as a meditation. Trying to keep a little distance from coloured splodges or around lines that I have already drawn or doodled. Somehow the lines remind me of the contours on a map, because they seem to join things together. Mostly I look at the back of my pictures and see if the ink has bled through it. I’ve written about this technique here before. It’s a way of creating something a little more abstract.