My Paris Invitation and the Long Awaited China Catalogue

For this post I am including some pictures relating to current and impending exhibitions. On Wednesday night I will be going to Gatwick airport as I have an early morning flight to Paris for the Salon des Beaux Arts exhibition Private View. Above is the invitation. I'm really excited about this exhibition! It will coincidentally be in the same week that the vote on the Brexit deal will be happening in London (11th December). I will be staying one night in Paris. Photos will follow!

Above is the exterior of the catalogue of the Dafen 1st International Oil Painting Biennale. I will probably receive my copy in the next few months and a friend on Facebook who was able to attend the Opening Ceremony sent me the photos of the catalogue.

This is my painting reproduced in the catalogue. I feel really pleased that it has its own page. 

In An Ideal World Artists Could Paint Every Day

In an ideal world, artists would paint as many days and hours as they wished or needed. Most painters I know complain that they don't get the chance to paint as much as they need in order to push their ideas forward and I feel the same. I would love to paint 7 days a week but life obligations inevitably reduce those precious hours. There are various Admin jobs that you have to keep on top of: website updating, social media posting, applications, noting deadlines in my diary, etc. I hoped today to get the chance to start some new, vertical canvases but instead found myself bogged down in these Admin jobs!

Paintings that are going to London, to show in the offices and foyer of Gordon Dadd solicitors (Covent Garden) on Thursday next week had to be prepared and bubble wrapped. Frequently this means tidying edges of canvases, attaching D-rings and making sure the work is signed. Then I spent ages updating social media, my website, and sanding stretchers prior to stretching canvas. 

For this post I've added some photos of myself painting in my studio in Daugavpils, Latvia, during the Mark Rothko Plein Air residency in 2012. It was one of my happiest times because I had a really large studio and could spread out the canvases and work as I prefer; bouncing between canvases and letting each one send ideas across to the others.

I think the truth is that no matter how many hours we paint, we will always want more, and the Admin times can also be good for thinking about what comes next. While considering a new body of work, I have also been busy finding a Paris hotel for the forthcoming Salon Des Beaux Arts (Caroussel du Louvre) which I am taking part in (December 13-16th). Having booked both hotel and flight from Gatwick, I'm beginning to feel really excited. My hotel is near the Louvre and I can't wait to see all the marvellous artworks that will be on display.

Paris and China

'Nostalgia,' corkboard with collage: canvas (painted with acrylic and ink), and acrylic and ink, 

Since my last post I found out I have been selected to show at a highly prestigious international exhibition in Paris in December - I will write more, and the name of the exhibition, once the details have been finalised and the painting is ready to photograph. I will be showing as part of a group of international artists. This selection came through a curator I met in Beijing in 2017 at the 7th Beijing International Art Biennale. I am really thrilled that she selected me!

Last week my MDF box for shipping my painting to China was delivered. Though I still don't have a shipping date I felt it was better to have it ready in advance.I still have to frame the painting.

For this post I am going to add a few images of some collage work I am currently doing as well as a painting about global warming. The collage work is an extension of some painting ideas and the great thing about collage is that it suggests new ways of creating texture and applying paint, and also new ways of creating shapes. So I am excited about these while still working on canvas purely with paint.

'Teardrops of the Setting Sun,' acrylic and ink on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

'Trees,' gesso, ink, collage (painted jute canvas) and acrylic, 25 x 25 cm