Exhibiting mountains...

Very soon one of my 'Mountain' pieces will be at the Curious Art-Pie Show. This will be my second exhibition and I feel ready this time. This is why:

1. I will not be using my debit card every second to fulfil my need for perfection. Over a cup of tea I was inputting my expenses from my first exhibition into a calculator and after seeing I had spent well over a couple of hundred pounds for a week long exhibitions I decided, not only did I need to switch to unbranded tea and stop buying posh biscuits, I needed to find a way to do it cheaper. As you will see below there are few reason I spent more than I needed...we all have to learn right?

2. Framing – its big business. The moment I realised my error was when I was discussing framing costs with a seasoned artist. She grabbed my hand and said 'come with me' and she took me to her artwork which was in a prime location and asked me what I thought of the framing – it was good! It suited her art and looked professional. 'Do you know where I got those frames? Ikea & a seconded hand shop, trust me dear you don’t need to spend a lot'! She also sold her pieces. Point taken!

 Apart from the cost of framing there is the frame itself. My first framing experience cost me a lot (a lot!) of money and it was the wrong choice (too dark and didn't suit the gallery). I should have done some research.  A frame seems to be like those touches you put on a house before you have potential buyers around. It's the smell of freshly baked bread or ground coffee! I thought this was silly, but its true, and it might just make a person stop, look and buy.

3. Business cards. I have a tendency to get ahead of myself and I did with business cards. I wanted to be different and decided to make my business cards look like postcards. I left it too late and did a rush job (staying up late and getting frustrated) and they came back looking anything but what I wanted. Plus I paid for a quick turn around. Trust me if you don’t have time don’t get ahead of yourself! Keep it simple. 

4. Believe in your art! I'm not used to blowing my own trumpet and a lot of the time I wanted to hide during the exhibition. Looking at my pieces on the large wall I couldn’t believe they were good enough to be there. But thats not true! I had to get over this, and I feel a hundred times more confident for my next exhibition.

5. Use social media! I forgot one important thing, I posted updates on twitter and facebook but did not put the exhibition on my website! Opps. Its hard to remember to cover all bases, especially when you have a busy full time job. This time I have covered my website in adverts for my next exhibition. Twitter and facebook have been amazing too as you can get conversations going before the exhibition and its free marketing! yay! Plus I've meet some lovely like-minded people this way too. 

7. Finally submit submit submit. I have submitted to 2 exhibitions and been picked for both! If you asked me a year ago if I thought that was possible I would have laughed at you! But there it is. Take a chance.

My first exhibition made me realise 2 things.

Firstly my friends and family are amazing. Their support and continuing encouragement is beyond belief. Secondly it gave me focus and made me find an area of my art I believed in. I'm 100% behind my mountain series and for the first time, when it comes to my art, I'm proud of myself. I always wanted others to be proud of me, but maybe all I really wanted was the opposite. Do it for yourself as most likely everyone else won't need convincing.

We can’t divorce the earth, so let the marriage counselling begin…

Art & Science

As I was drinking my tea and flicking through the endless menus on Netflix’s (a common affair for me) I came across the documentary ‘Chasing Ice’. I had noticed it before but I’m sorry to say due to ‘Breaking Bad’ taking over all my Netflix time I’ve only just got around to watching this. I love frozen landscapes, especially after me and a friend were lucky enough to head up to the Arctic Circle in 2009. Everything about these places is pure magic. I know that sounds cheesy, but the stillness, the limited colours, the emptiness of sound and sense of size is pretty indescribable.

Chasing Ice, in the words of its synopsis is…

…”the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers’.

See more at: http://www.chasingice.com

‘Oh look a rabbit jumping over a fence wearing a top hat’…’where? I see a cumulus cloud, which is likely to turn into a cumulonimbus and soak me on the way home’…’oh’

Seeing the world

Project Paint Plane was about sharing my vision and experiences of the world. It’s about exploring how ‘vistas’ & places interact with our emotions, how the brain turns light into colour & sound into a sense of size, and how together they create a memory. It’s this memory that is the inspiration behind my work.

I remember in images. My memory doesn't seem to work well in any other way. I struggle to remember names, even if you tell me them 10 times over; not the name of an author I love or a song that inspires me will make its way into my head. But I can recall every detail of an image, the light, the shadows and it's overall 'mood'. This is great for art, but not so good in day to day life, and can be frustrating when I want to share something 'amazing' I can't remember the name off (and I don’t always have time to sneak a look at google).

’Have you no interest in making money? I ask. ‘You could be like Robert Crumb. You could be a rich man’ Jon Ronson

Art is for the Artist?

Before I ‘created’ Paintplane I would say I was pretty frustrated with art, so much so that I repeatedly packed everything away and vowed never to touch it again. People tell me I’m good at art – but what good is technical skill when you can’t pinpoint what it is you want to say? Actually that’s not totally true I did know what I wanted to say; I wanted to express myself, my views, my opinions, what touches me, my beliefs, my ideas, what makes me angry etc; Basically I wanted to express ‘me’. I never figure out how to do this – seriously how do you paint a feeling, how do you capture a moment or the firing of trillions of synapses on canvas? I tried a lot of things to get through this block, I got a studio but ended up just sitting in a small room with a brush, a blank canvas and an empty brain (my synapses were defiantly not firing then). I put my hand to lots of careers, signed up to lots of courses, and I tried to create what I thought would sell (I can recommend never to do that – the biggest destructive force to creativity is commercialism in my opinion). Nothing, zilch, diddily squat!