I do have a wooden heart …

There's nothing like a deadline for getting the creative juices flowing. And I have a deadline. This wooden heart is to be decorated in any way I fancy and returned to St Clare's Hospice, Jarrow by the 1st September in time for a charity event.

The Hospice will be holding an exhibition of these decorated hearts (one of them has been decorated by "Call me Dave" Cameron - be still my beating heart!) in November. There'll be a catalogue and a website and I'll be sure to post details of those in due course.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid I'll be unable to share progress of my heart's painting with you. The work will all be displayed anonymously, although a list of contributors will be available. Later, after the exhibition has closed and the work has been sold, I'll let you see what I came up with.

Cataloguing with Flick!

I've been planning on cataloguing my work for some time now. I really need a centralised database of all the work I've produced in the last 20 years, with details of sizes, prices, exhibitions they've been in, galleries who've shown them and who bought them.

This looked like one of those tasks that might never get off the ground, but reading about a piece of software in The Cycling Artist, has shown it is achievable after all. Several times on that blog, Tina Mammoser has extolled the virtues of Flick! software for just this purpose, so I downloaded it, tried it out and bought it.

It really is a great bit of kit. It has so many useful functions that I've been playing with for days, while beginning the task of entering details of my work. Admittedly, this is still a mammoth task, but I doubt that any other system could make it easier.