More Flowers

Pile of Pansies, 8x8, acrylic on board

I've been back to the flowers today - this time a pile of blue pansies. This is a small painting, only 8x8 but I love the vivid electric blue colour. I chose to back it on a pink/red background so that the whole painting is pretty much based around the 3 primary colours which I think works well here.

I also did this slightly larger anemone painting (got to love anemones!) which is going to be part of a tryptich... watch this space for the next two!

Red Anemone, 18x18, acrylic on canvas

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. 

A week to go

I have been functioning on rather a lot less sleep than usual and packing as much into each day in order to get everything ready for next weeks installation. It hasn't helped that my productivity levels have been hindered by malfunctioning equipment like my staple gun and more recently, a newly purchased butane torch which refused to light at the vital moment. The torch is very helpful when applying resin to paintings as the carbon dioxide given off by the flame makes the thousands of tiny bubbles that rise to the surface of the resin burst, leaving a bubble free, perfectly clear surface. Without the torch, I had to resort to blowing on the painting through a straw which took over an hour and left me very light headed!