musn't grumble, i have some exhibitions coming up over the summer...
NCA10 at The Forum, Norfolk Contemporary Art Society, 1 to 21 July 2010. NCA10 is a curated exhibition of work from artists of the NCAS, including painting, photography, ceramics and mixed media. Open daily, free admission. All work is for sale.Textures, Traces & Elements at Beyond the Image Gallery, 2 July to 1 August 2010. Artists Hazel Bignell, Jazz Green & Carol Pask will be showing recent paintings, prints, ceramics and textiles, inspired by the East Anglian Landscape.
[thirty intaglio collagraphs on paper on canvas, 2010]stop press: i will have three large edgescape canvases in another exhibition, entitled Rebirth at Gallery Art 1821 in the fine city of Norwich, opening 29 July – 8 September 2010. read more about the future exhibition Rebirth…
Artworks 11th Anuual Exhibition at Rougham Barn, 11 September to 3 October 2010, with ‘Artists Making an Exhibition of Themselves’ on Saturday 2 October 2010 - an event when 'Artworks' artists set up temporary ‘studios’ in front of their work at the exhibition. Artworks is a group of thirty professional East Anglian Artist....in the meantime, i am looking for paid work this summer... i saw a job advertised today, for gallery assistants, offering daytime shifts of four hours @ £5.97 per hour = £23.88 - £10 petrol (commuting) = £13.88... {sigh}...at the weekend i visited the studio of an internationally acclaimed potter, but he is now producing lots of paintings. he said that he was enjoying painting more without the immediate worry of making money from it, much evidenced by the quality and quantity of his output.after the job search, i felt even less motivated to do any painting (or make any more prints), so instead i baked an apple and blueberry crumble and then decided i would do some more lichen drawings (you can view some of my previous lichen drawings here)... there is no grand idea or concept with drawing, its just very therapeutic......
on hoping; it's a pony
it's been about twenty five years since i decided i would be an artist... twenty five is a relevant number today, wikipedia helpfully defines it as 'the natural number following 24 and preceding 26'...in the year 2025 i hope i will still be working as an artist, living in a very big house, making very big work in a very big studio, in the country, but things may work out differently…i have been thinking alot about art, money and making it as an artist this week (future finances, and other ideas) because my current teaching contract ends in a couple of weeks… however, i will have some new work featured in two exhibitions in july.i have had four small paintings on canvas selected for a new art exhibition, Norfolk Contemporary Art 2010, at The Forum, Norwich. next up, there will be the exhibition Textures, Traces & Elements (with mixed media artist Hazel Bignell and ceramicist Carol Pask) at Beyond the Image Gallery, which is in the heart of the historic Thornham Estate (a fantastic setting - lots of trees, nature, walks)... but more on those two exhibition events nearer the time.sometimes i fancifully imagine as i write this that maybe some real people are reading this out of interest - apparently my blog spam widget has saved this blog from over 10,000 spam comments since November 2009 - but i find putting up images and text is (or will be) quite interesting for my good self to read again in the future.in the meantime, i need to have a bit of a 'studio clearance' of my recent experimental series of small abstracts on paper, to settle up so to speak... and instead focus on doing things closer to home - but it has been brilliant having some of these small works on paper fly across the pond...shown below are some of the paintings in the series of one hundred abstracts in a day (aka chromatids), all at twenty five (in uk pounds) - and they are about twenty five grams in weight (give or take).these small paintings work best when viewed as part of a series, and they explore my endless fascination with naturally weathered surfaces, but presented here in a more condensed, ordered and sequential way.please scroll down to view...you can also contact me at
...if you are interested in purchasing any of these paintings.
...random reminiscence: i once took a car for a joyride, a toy pedal car that is, a very smart, bright, shiny red car... i was probably about five or six years old and it was the summer holidays as i recall... the car was just parked up (abandoned at teatime) on a lawn outside a large grey-brick house, shaded by trees... i thought i'd take the little red car for a little spin up and down the pavement for a while (a totally irrational act of thrill-seeking) - i think i may even have driven it home, with an unlikely story about just 'finding it'... it was a very naughty thing to do but it was the most exhilarating drive for a girl; i never really liked ponies......a pony is a small horse (naturally), but it is also slang for £25, and also cockney-rhyming slang for crap (pony and trap)......
notes from an exhibition
As I was passing through the marketplace towards the forum building in Norwich, to revisit the exhibition Elements: Man and the Environment on its final day, I passed by a secondhand book stall, and, after a few minutes browsing the shelves, came across the novel Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale - perhaps, with a sense of deja-vous or subliminal or tacit knowing, I instantly conjured up what this story might reveal... when one door closes another door opens... the end of an art exhibition is a good time for some reflection.This is a self-portrait taken in the seductive, highly-polished surface of Andrew Campbell's bronze sculpture, 'I remember' at the exhibition Elements. There is always something narcissistic in the allure of the mirrored surface - less about the physical form of an object reflecting its environs, and more about how it plays with our own self-perception...
It appeared to be a direct cast of an inflated balloon, and as a bronze it looked like a majestic orb on its plinth, the sophisticated, beautiful cousin of the ill-fated lead balloon (but even bronze will sink), and also (in my eyes), recalled memories of childhood, of releasing fairground helium balloons high into the sky, with a mixture of uncertainty and excitement - never quite knowing how high or how far they would travel, and where they would eventually land. This bronze balloon was grounded but would, at the very least, avert an instant death by pin... I found by chance (googling bronze balloon) more of Andrew Campbell's work on flickr...Nearby were two mixed media sculptural works by the Norwich-based artist Louise Richardson, pieces which were imbued with a simultaneously poetic and macabre narrative in their dichotomy of materials - dresses made of concrete and bronze, dresses stained and tainted by the earth, left to nature and the elements, enchanting in their suggestion of ancient myths or fairy tales, of the craftsmanship in their delicate making, and yet sinister and haunting in what we see in the casket-like frames, the relics or remains of a past event, of mortality, death or ghosts...
Louise Richardson, 'Being' left and 'Host' right; concrete, cold cast bronze, mixed mediaVeronica Grassi's Decaying Vessels have a simliar, delicate resonance - of fragility and strength, the remains of nests, shells or cocoons, and all exquisitely made with the finest of threads and paper pulp.
Veronica Grassi, 'Decaying Vessels', stitched thread and paperJamie Andrews sculpture, 10,000 Men was the centrepiece of the exhibition, having won the £1000 Bayer Prize. It is made up of 10,000 toy soldiers, coagulated into a resinous, bloodied funereal pile, with a clear message that war is both messy and futile - it made me think of the collective will in the construction of ant-hills too, that even in a situation such as war the soldiers (or workers) just get on with the job ...
Jamie Andrews, '10,000 Men', mixed mediaThese are just a selection of the many artworks in Elements:Man and the Environment, ones which resonated with myself, in a very mixed, curated exhibition. These works were the more inspiring ones, ones which at their core, had materials and craftsmanship as integral to the concepts of the finished work. I may not have earned the grand but I am proud that I was selected, and pleased that my work received such good exposure and some recognition in the process. I will look into that occasional mirror of doubt and see that I am still an artist - it may not be the all-day-every-day occupation that myself and many other artists aspire to, but it is, in the end, my one-and-only vocation...
Jazz Green, 'Rost', mixed media on canvas