Looking at Paintings

Exhibition time rolls round again, so I’m starting to look at paintings, some unfinished, to see what might be submitted where. I usually find this process kickstarts the creative process too (not before time!)

Christmas Exhibition

Something to put in your diary. I'll have up to eight of my paintings in this Xmas show.

Gateshead Art Society Xmas Exhibition

I'll be showing these four small paintings (all acrylic, 8x8 ins.):

Greetings Cards

Time to announce that you can now buy Greetings Cards based on my paintings and cartoons from LoveFromTheArtist.com . 

Go on, you know you want to!

My Art on Walls

It's always good to see how my paintings look when they've been hung on the walls of those nice people who thought enough of them to buy them. Here are two of those walls.

Six Italian Caps

Six Italian Caps 
(Markers in A5 sketchbook)

Although I haven't finished the small paintings I began last week, I've been thinking about ideas for some new ones. This is a drawing I did today of some baseball caps I photographed in Bari last year. 

I think it has potential, but, as always, I'd be interested to hear your opinions. This is a colour try-out in Photoshop:

Wall of Paintings

My good friends Roy and Kathleen recently sent me this photograph of a wall in their house. They've hung it with paintings they've bought from me over the last few years and I'm thrilled with the way it looks.

Isn't it rewarding to see your work obviously giving pleasure to those who've bought it?

Paintings at Cragside

ITALIAN GIRL WITH DOVES, 1866 by Rafaello Sorbi (1844-1931)

Lord Armstrong, the man behind the construction of Cragside, died without an heir and his estate passed to his great nephew. In the tradition of undeserving inheritors, he quickly spent much of the fortune and to pay his bills many of the prime artworks in the family collection, including paintings by  Millais, Turner, Wilkie and Leighton, were sold in 1910.

The collection is therefore now sadly depleted, but there's a good Turner and this painting which I particularly liked.

The Wooden Spiral

The Wooden Spiral (Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 ins)

This is one of the paintings included in my exhibition currently running at the Newcastle Arts Centre. It's quite an old one - from 2004 - and for a while I was uncertain whether I would keep it at all. Recently, however, I took it out of the rack, gave it a bit of a tidy up. and decided I actually do like it. There's a more subdued lighting in it that suits Newcastle rather well.

The subject, in case you don't know Newcastle, shows at the left  what was built as The Oxford Ballrooms but has over the years had its name changed to reflect the need for something new for the yoofs. You may have heard of Thomas Heatherwick: he's the man responsible for the cauldron at the Olympic Games, one of his better efforts. In Newcastle he persuaded the Council that it would be a good thing to lay a pretend carpet of tiles made from crushed blue sherry bottles. the result was not the bright blue carpet he intended but a rather dull grey landscape. A little more effective was his cladding of a functional spiral metal  staircase in wood panelling. That's what you can see at the right hand side of the painting. It leads through a barren land of empty office buildings to a bridge over the Central Motorway - not one of Newcastle's highlights.

Home Again

Corflu Attendees (minus a couple who couldn't get out of bed) (Photo:Mike Scott)

What a wonderful weekend! I met people I haven't seen in thirty years and it was just like yesterday. In all sorts of ways I can't begin to describe, I came back from Winchester thoroughly invigorated. One cartoon for a fanzine cover already under my belt (a rare enough event in itself) and ideas for new paintings in a notebook.

Getty Images

Those of you who have taken the time to look round my blog will have noticed the Flickr badge in the sidebar at the right. Clicking on it takes you to my Flickr pages where (so I'm told) I have over 400 images of paintings, drawings, sketches and cartoons.

Some months ago I was contacted by Flickr who told me about a new arrangement with Getty Images and said that Getty Images were interested in buying a two year copyright licence on half a dozen of my paintings. After a bit of thought and some investigations, this seemed like a decent proposition, so signed I up for it. A few days ago, they told me they want another half dozen.

There are always problems with what appears to be a straightforward project. I needed a PayPal account into which they can pay any royalties, so I've set one up. They also need images with a much higher resolution than what's actually on my Flickr pages, but everything can be sorted out. I've spent the last few days raising the resolution in Photoshop and filling out the description boxes required for Getty.

And now I sit back and watch the money roll in? I should be so lucky, but it'll be interesting to see how it all works out.

Fi-Fie-Fo-Fum

Ivy sections (A4 sketchbook)

I had a really enjoyable afternoon out yesterday. Mo and I went up to the Fi-Fie-Fo-Fum gallery at Newton; the weather was glorious and the views round the gallery are spectacular. The views inside the gallery are pretty good too.

Tom Moore had invited us to see the big new paintings he's working on for his upcoming show at the Northumbria Gallery, partly for reassurance that they were on the right track (they definitely were!) and partly just for a chat, I think. I know only too well how isolated life can become working in the studio day after day.

During a very wide-ranging conversation, we touched on the way the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle had taken down the lovely paintings on the staircase when they repainted the walls and disappointingly never put them back.

Tom has discovered the reason. It's that old demon, Health & Safety!

Apparently, should there be a fire, the public would be in severe danger of being caught by burning shreds of masterpieces raining down from the walls of the staircase. In an art gallery! Who'd have thought such dangers existed? I've been risking my life all these years and never knew.

I wonder if the owners of stately homes know what perils they live with as long as they have their ancestral portraits lining those grand - but potentially lethal - stairs.