Cyprus, New Canvas and Good News!

'My Somewhere Else,' acrylic and ink on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

It is just over a month since I last posted. It has been a packed month which included a visit of 8 days to Cyprus, and painting through the hottest days of the summer so far in the UK. I am going to post a few of the new paintings.

Then yesterday I received good news: an email that told me I have been selected for the Dafen 1st International Art Biennale, (Shenzhen, China) which I applied to mid-May. I have posted the submitted painting several times before but will post again! The theme was Social Integration and Opening Up, and my painting is entitled 'Social Integration, Peace and Opening Up,' and it is acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 by 140 cm. I had given up on hearing any news about this exhibition because submitting my image file turned out to be so hard and I thought it had failed. I'd spent some 6 hours one evening trying to resize a file that was too small! The online form required a file not less than 5 MB, and in the end I had to make my file a TIFF file which made it 25 MB. I had no idea if the file had loaded to their online form so I sent it by email too. I think it is time to buy a better quality camera that can give higher resolution images. The image posted below is not the most accurate image but gives an idea of the work.

The two new paintings I am posting are painted on some canvas I bought in Cyprus. I bought two types of canvas, one is very smooth and one is brown and quite rough. I began with the smooth canvas and found that it allows the layering of transparent colour and brush strokes to really stand out in a beautiful way. The green painting has a much richer green background in that the brush strokes and layers show more variation of colour, and this painting may be finished, and the red painting is still 'in progress.' I have two others on the go but I am not sure of them yet. I am looking forward to a series of paintings which will mix collaged brown and white canvas with mixed media and I was really pleased to find materials in Cyprus that I have not been able to find in the UK.

'They Passed Many Trees on Their Way to the Mountains,' (2)  acrylic and ink on canvas - in progress