New paintings and regular art updates.
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.
A grey day in Yorkshire. Salts Mill at Saltaire. Looking at this old mill with its huge chimney you wouldn’t think there was an amazing bookshop, a cafe and restaurant and gallery’s there with work by world famous artist David Hockney.
Saltaire is near Bradford and Leeds, it is an old area of Shipley and the mill is surrounded by small stone terraced houses that only have a main room, a kitchen and a small bedroom and bathroom. Saltaire featured in a recently updated version of the classic film the railway children.
The mill sits between the railway on one side and the canal and river on the other side if it lower down the hill. The small houses are a beautiful example of a historic area. Saltaire also holds a food festival in the summer which attracts international visitors.
I wish Stoke on Trent had the courage to create something like this from its own historic buildings. This would be a blueprint we could build on.
A painting from five years ago. I do like painting birds, particularly owls. I made a few in pottery class at school, I just like the circles of feathers round their faces that help direct sound to their ears (I might be wrong?) and do they have one ear higher than the other for the same reason. I need to find out.
What to do in your open studio? Meet lots of people who want to ask questions. I got nervous seeing so many people so I decided to paint my hubby reading. It’s a vert small studio and as one lot of people left another came in. I tried speaking but it’s hard to know what people think and after avoiding people for a couple of years because of Covid I have become more socially inept. It’s just hard to know what to say. But anyway overall it was a positive feeling. I sold one minature painting and made the princely sum of £4!
I’m going to go to Spode Open Day on Saturday. It’s part of being a studio member at the old Spode Factory in Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent. I might be selling small paintings, but it’s been so long since I’ve been there that I have really got out of going in. With the pandemic and then illness and then a recent bereavement it’s been hard to pluck up courage to go in. My mind just got stuck in park (if that’s the phrase) and its been hard to get out of that feeling, but I think I’m slowly making progress. Anyway the painting is called Green Man, it’s a favourite subject of mine. Something serene and mystical about this mythical character (maybe not this particular one though).
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.
Spode studios are having an open day this Saturday so I hope to be there to show off some of my newest ideas and paintings. It’s sometimes quite cold though so I will have to dress warmly. This horse painting has a pot for the potteries hidden in it. I’m not sure if I will stay in my studio or set up a little market stall so I can try and sell a few things. I will have to decide.
An old drawing I did of the local church one Christmas. It’s coming up to that time if year to decide what paintings to do for Christmas. I don’t want to make them too twee. They have to be something someone would want to hang on a wall. I half want to paint little icon paintings, or maybe images taken from something like the book of Kells. It’s hard to decide, do Robins work? Or are they just things you find on a Christmas card that get brought out once a year? Who knows?
Another old painting. This was from about eleven years ago. The planet has only completed part of its orbit around the sun since I painted it. I don’t know why I paint astronomical objects, they are hard to do! Acrylic on canvas. This was my attempt at Jupiter. This banded gas giant is renowned for its great red spot (a storm that has been shrinking for a few centuries). I think painting planets is like knitting, trying to fit the right pattern in the right place. I also don’t think my paint is blended enough. I have lots of astronomical paintings, I need someone to be interested in them!
I have to go and collect my owl painting from the Brampton open exhibition tomorrow. It was for sale and I would have liked to have sold it. I have an open studio day at Spode on November 12th so perhaps I could sell it there. I am pessimistic though. There is less money available and I think things will get a lot worse before it gets better. Being an artist doesn’t make you rich! But I can’t stop painting.
Mallaband-Brown