Right Turn

Right Turn (Oil on board, 18 x 17 ins) £420

It seems I'm faced with a dearth of exhibiting opportunities this year. Many of the galleries I've shown in during the last couple of years are now booked up for the next couple of years. So, whenever an opportunity arises to get paintings out of the studio and onto a wall, I take it.

The Federation of Northern Art Societies is about to hold its annual exhibition at Preston Hall Museum in Stockton-on-Tees and as a member of the North of England Art Club, I was entitled to submit two paintings for consideration. Which I did. When I got home today after a weekend in Tynemouth, there was a phone message to say that, not only have my paintings been accepted, this one, Right Turn, showing a street in Crete, has been Highly Commended. There's a cheque attached to the Commendation, too.

No major exhibitions maybe, but this year seems to be turning into one of Success by Drip Feed.

Prague Tram No.2

Prague Tram No.2 (Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 ins)

I must try to get a better photograph of this painting, but when I took this one, the paint was still wet and terribly reflective. Coupled with the tendency of this monitor at least to do strange things with reds, this may not be too representative of the work.

The show opened at Preston Hall on Saturday. It was a fine sunny day and there was a garden show open in the grounds, so the awful possibility that no one would come to look wasn't fulfilled. There was a respectable trickle of people walking through the exhibition space. Admittedly, some were simply walking through to see where the door at the other side of the room led (nowhere), and others were looking for things to keep their kids amused; or the opposite - "Come away, Tracey, it's only some paintings!" And as usual, there was the sniggering as fingers were pointed at the prices on the labels - "£400!"

But overall, the response was good and I was pleased to be told how much some people liked my trams and how two of them - Nos.1 & 2 - reminded one person of Edward Hopper. I told her I was a big Hopper fan and she said, "Me too, but now I'm a Harry Bell fan as well".

Useful Day

Yesterday I went with Mo and Frank the Dripper to inspect the exhibition space at Preston Hall and meet its Curator. She couldn't have been more helpful and now we know what kind of space Figure 8 will have to fill when we put on our newly-arranged show there in May.

Preston Hall is a fascinating place, full of collections of all sorts of stuff, but notable for it's painting, The Dice Players by Georges de La Tour, the last he completed. The grounds are considerable and there's a curiously large aviary, some forty feet tall, containing rabbits! Boy, but those rabbits must fly higher than any I've encountered previously. I guess the snow kept them grounded.

The exhibition space is not enormous, but will give us an opportunity to show work to another part of the region. And the restrictions made by the addition of a picture rail part of the way up the wall makes it necessary, I think, for us to paint new work no larger than about two feet.

At last -- another target to work towards. Now maybe I can get focused.

After our trip to Preston Hall, I went on to the Art Club and made more progress on the Free Trade Inn picture. I didn't have my camera, unfortunately, so no work in progress photograph, but I'll try to remedy that today or tomorrow.