Affordable Art Fair

We went to the Affordable Art Fair this weekend which had a great variety of new work from all over the world. There were a few paintings there that had been resined and I have to admit I had a moment of smug satisfaction when I noticed that many of them also had rather a lot of dust embedded in their surfaces - at least it's not just me who has this problem! 


I particularly loved the work of Phuong Quoc Tri, whose monochrome oil paintings of female nudes I thought were hauntingly beautiful.  There was also the work of up and coming New York based artist Erik Sanner, who uses video projections laid over original paintings to create installations of constantly changing "moving paintings". These were particularly original and fun to view. Last but not least, Zhou HongBin's "Aquarium 10" also really struck us as an amazing piece of photography.

Unfortunately, the pieces we fell in love with were not quite so "affordable" so we didn't buy anything. However, it was still great to see so much talent and so many new ideas emerging. 

Dust

I am being haunted by dust. Nothing I do seems to stop it or even keep it at bay for just a few hours. It is just always there, lurking, waiting for me to varnish something so that it can find a permanent home on the surface of my paintings. Or better yet embed itself in my resin. This is the worst scenario due to the expense of the resin and the lengthy drying time. So far out of three resined paintings all three are having to be redone because of this - not a great track record! I have become a little obsessive about cleaning as a result, the vacuum cleaner has never felt so loved.  

In a desperate attempt to prevent this from happening I have taken to cutting up plastic dry cleaning bags and taping them together to make large dust covers that I precariously drape over my drying work. This, of course, leads to all sorts of other problems should the plastic come into contact with the varnish, but that's a story for another day! I'm sure there must be an easier way. Perhaps moving house?