A Viewing.

     I was up at 6.20am, as usual. I helped dress Alice (my niece) and took her up to her waiting school taxi at 7.15am. A group of men arrived to put scaffolding up around our block of flats. As the clink of heavy metal poles echoed outside the window, I was running around with canvases in my hands, placing them in positions around the room, in preparation for viewing by my art agent, June. I assumed that the three hours I had before her arrival was ample time, but it was scarcely enough! I selected 25 canvases, and after trimming off rebellious strands of canvas, labelling them, whitening a few unprimed edges, and displaying them against tables, on sofas, and in front of the TV, it was with a few minutes to spare.

June chose 10 paintings. We made a list of the titles and measurements and prices. I realised that I need to paint more large canvases, as June likes my larger paintings and feels that they really suit a corporate environment. I am also very happy working large, as the scale suits my use of colour. I felt rather awkward explaining why I couldn't part with the two huge canvases on the living room walls. One is about the memory of Nicosia and my late partner Tom, and has huge sentimental value. The other, a large (140cm by 140cm) canvas about women in the Turkish Baths in Nicosia, I had promised my husband I would hold on to!  But the positive aspect is that June knows I will be painting some more 'biggies' soon.

Now it is a matter of waiting for confirmation that the work will go on show at the Kings Hill Project.

(My paintings, scattered around the living room this morning!)

Spring Fever

As Spring unfolds day by day, painting ideas are bursting into my mind at fever pitch. In 10 days I stretched up 8 canvases, primed them and scrubbed on a thin layer of acrylic colour - usually a grey, lilac or pale brown. I like to work into a colour, as it gives me something definite to react against, and often I allow the colour to become mottled or uneven as I tend to carve my shapes out of this colour. But Spring fever threw white onto my fresh canvases and I'm working directly into wet white paint. It gets pushed around with my biggest palette knife, softened with my fingers, and scribbled on with all manner of brushes. The energies of Spring translate themselves into paint, and I believe that even the most abstract of artists are affected by this sudden flow of light and splatters of colour.

I always work at a restless, fever pitch, as I squeeze my painting hours between being a Carer for a disabled child. I manage to paint between 20 to 25 hours a week, and draw at any hour of the day. My time as a Carer tends to occupy the early mornings and evenings and nights. The ideal is to be a full-time artist, and I have just put my work for sale on several websites as prints and originals, and updated my own website with a view to selling work there. Self-marketing also has to be fitted into my day, as I search the internet for exhibition opportunities and join new websites.

The painting 'A Landscape of Choices' refers to the choices made about paint, marks, and colour, and is about my inner landscape, and reactions to the paint. The traces of my choices are left on the picture. I wanted the painting to suggest the passage of time - the time between each brushmark and choice, the choices we make in our lives.

('A Landscape of Choices,' Oil and acrylic on board, 91cm by 61cm, 2012)

Time or Not

As Christmas draws closer, I am racing to finish some work before a few days of non-painting causes my oils to dry. I remember my student days, when time was a distant concern and I could devote all my waking hours to my paintings. A false sense of time stretched out indefinitely. As I tweaked some paintings yesterday, I debated whether a lack of time seriously damages or invalidates one's work. For most artists, 5 days a week in a studio is a goal yet to be attained, so painting is slotted between daily duties. I know artists who work full-time and paint at night, or spend all their weekends painting. I would dearly love the chance to paint full-time, as I believe that it promotes a flow and rhythm I can't have when I work in irregular hours, snatched here and there. (Though I probably have more time to paint than friends who have children.)

But all the part-time artists I know haven't suffered any loss of integrity or substance in their work. So it made me wonder if perhaps a lack of time can force you to focus very intensely and make some deeply considered and quite definite decisions. I wondered if perhaps it could be turned to an advantage? Most artists are painting even when the brush is not in their hand, and it's possible to sit in front of my canvas and find that the stored hours of visual adjustments and possibilities, played with internally during daily routines, suddenly flood into the painting. Many a painting has been finished in the final half hour, when pressure forced unexpected resolutions.

('Terrain.' Oil and acrylic on board, 31cm x 61cm)

Square versus Rectangle

Recently I have been exploring differently shaped canvases to challenge my increasingly pre-set response to landscape composition. It occurred to me how the dynamics change according to the shape you choose. When it comes to painting in situ, I tend to automatically use a rectangular shape of watercolour paper, yet I don't want 'automatic' responses in my work!

I stretched up a selection of squares and rectangles, and found myself totally out of my comfort zone. Squares seem to demand that you 'break' their calmness and symmetry, and this in itself gives clues as to how to build the composition. I found it literally opened new horizons for me. Rectangles were a bit more familiar, so I tried some longer ones, and then of course you have to make sure your painterly elements link along the entire dynamic. New questions appear, which in turn expand your perception and approach.

In writing this, I'm aware that it may come across as being quite technical and devoid of the emotional aspects of painting. I believe that as a painter, you need to keep evaluating technical and aesthetic issues, in order to find the best expression for your evolving emotional responses to both paint and external factors. The shape of your 'arena' seems to be a huge factor in the presentation of your passion and ideas, and a very exciting one.

(Paintings: 'Autumn Rythms,' oil and acrylic on canvas, 90cm x 50cm. 'Breezy Spring Day,' oil and acrylic, 60cm x 27cm. 'The Hill,' 30cm x 30cm, Oil and acrylic on canvas)

Choices

As I prepare to go to Cyprus for a few weeks, I'm thinking about the way that no one thing affects the way a painting evolves. Poetry flows from layers of experience, finds its path into a painterly vision from mulitple scents, sights and emotions, and memories.

'Choices: Carob Trees and Figures at Dusk' emerged through the act of painting, and through the realisation that the points of red paint could be a metaphor for the last rays of the sun during a walk along the coast in Paphos. The choices represent paint choices, as much as referring to the choices we all make as human beings. It was painted 3 months after my experience of the coastal walks, but I start to wonder if perhaps that passage of time allows a purer synthesis of

the original sensations. Links are constantly forged, broken, re-created, and drop into a painting in unexpected ways. I find the contrasts between painting in situ, painting from memory, and the many walks here and abroad coagulate and re-assemble in my work in ways that are increasingly exciting me.

('Choices: Carob Trees and Figures at Dusk,' Oil and acrylic, 91cm x 61cm)

Fiona has her own website!

It's taken me 2 weeks to set up, but finally my website is up and running! It can be seen on the right hand side of this post, under 'Fiona's Paintings website.' It still needs a little updating, but showcases all the themes I like to paint.

Currently I'm painting outdoors. I'm totally obsessed with the colours of Spring. As I travel in the taxi every morning accompanying my niece to school, the vibrant passages of fiery greens, pinks, ochres and infinite variations of lemon-greens, and lilacs, have been an immense inspiration for painting. Though the new oils started out in a fairly literal way, I now find I want to spread shapes of colour across the canvases in an abstract way, just letting the colour dictate how the paintings should proceed.

Other than that, I'm about to get some paintings scanned digitally for a company that wants to put them onto prints for 4 and 5 star hotels and restaurants around the world. Considering that a year ago, my London gallery politely dumped me, I feel that things are looking up! (Read post from 12th May 2009, called 'Striped Coffee Cups.')