A week ago I took a train down to Whitstable on the North Kent coast to put up an exhibition with two friends, Phil Gomm and Phill Hosking at The Horsebridge Centre and today I’m on the train back up to London having taken the pictures down and packed everything away.

I’m glad to say the exhibition went extremely well with lots of visitors, positive feedback, sales, commissions, buzz; in fact everything you wish for when you’re planning a show.

Last Tuesday was a long, tiring day getting everything up and feeling nervous, but helped a great deal by putting the thing together with friends rather than wrestling with it on my own:

By then end of the day, though, we got it all done and the space looked really good. We then had a short pause to catch our breath before the private view at the weekend. Nervous again, but loads of lovely people came and made the day very enjoyable. We finished off the day with some quality winding down time in the pub followed by some laughs over dinner. Here are a couple of images of Saturday afternoon; the lovely big gallery space made for a relaxed and comfortable private view for friends, family and passers by:

What made the week such a pleasure for me was showing with two friends and sharing the experience. Phil Gomm and Phill Hosking are two pals who are not only gifted artists but wonderful human beings as well, and it all felt something of a privilege to do something like this with the two of them. So, a bit more about my co-exhibitors:

Phil Gomm is, amongst many other things, Course Leader for the Computer Animation Arts degree course at the University of Creative Arts, at their Rochester campus. Phil has put together an excellent post telling the story of the week in images on his course blog. You can see the post here, in fact I’ve nicked his photos for this post so thanks to Phil and Tom for the pics! As well as the busy full-time job, Phil is also a very talented writer, and his recent trilogy Chimera, a brilliantly entertaining, touching, rip-roaring roller-coaster of a tale for younger readers and adults alike, is available via Amazon – you  can see the five start review here!. He’s also managed to find the time to put together a magical series of photographs for the exhibition. The six images, titled ‘Visitations’, are mounted on lighthboxes and were taken in a rural garden in France in summer. Phil has used long exposure techniques to capture weird and wonderful light effects which conjure all kinds of fantastic sci-if and phatasmagorical apparitions. In their black lighthboxes the glowing images really looked dramatic, mysterious and very beautiful. Here’s Phil with some of his images:

Phill Hosking is a freelance artist working in illustration, toy and action figure sculpture, and concept art. As with Phil Gomm, Phill has that impressive and maddening habit of being brilliant at everything he does – you can see his art blog here. For this exhibition Phill showed a selection of portraits and landscapes (as well as a stunning sketchbook) painted in oil on canvas, and the work was just jaw-droppingly good, demonstrating Phill’s sheer talent for painting, drawing and imagining. Here he is with some of the work he showed:

And here’s me with some of the work I showed this week. Thanks to Andy at Whistable Framers for framing the work so beautifully:

Now, at the end of the show, I’m fighting off the post-exhibition blues but I feel very happy and proud of what we did and I’ve come away with loads of ideas of what I want to move onto next.

It only remains for me to say a huge thank you to the team at The Horsebridge for being so helpful and supportive, to all our friends, family and partners who came, to people who dropped in and had a chat with us, to Jan for flying over from Berlin and being there, and a massive thank you to Phil and Phill for making it the success that it was.

Ok, now for a nice sit down and a cuppa 🙂

It’s chocks away at the Horsebridge Centre in Whitstable and our group exhibition is now up – phew! It was a long day yesterday hanging all the work but enjoyable too as I was working with my two friends and co-exhibitors Phill Gomm and Phill Hosking.

It’s much more fun putting a show together with friends than on your own and at the end of the day when we stood back to view the gallery I think we were all happy with the result.

We experienced the usual few last minute hitches to tweak up the anxiety levels – a door slammed and one of my pictures leapt of the wall and smashed – but nothing disasterous and the end result feels like an interesting and lively show. We are all working in different media but the images hang together and compliment each other well. Phil Gomm had designed some large format prints with our names and blown up details of our artwork to publicise the exhibition which looked a treat in the main gallery window (you can see them in the pic at the start of this post). He’d done the same for our artists statements on the gallery wall you first encounter inside and it gave the show a smart, professional presentation.

Only had the iPad camera with me on the day so I’ll post some better images at the weekend when we have the private view as well as better photos of the actual artwork on show. For now, here’s me, tired but happy at the end of yesterday:

And a blurry photo (sorry) of a Phill Hosking putting up his extraordinary portraits and landscapes in oil on canvas:

Phil Gomm is showing a series of six dramatic photographic prints using long exposure techniques presented on lightboxes. The images were taken on a summer night in a rural garden in France and the results were beautiful, with some pieces evoking early photography and phantasmagoria, and other pieces introducing elements of science fiction. Phil’s titled the series ‘Visitations’ which encapsulates the atmosphere of the images perfectly.

I’ll post more about the work and the artists at the weekend 🙂

Putting the show up tomorrow and Weds. so had these little business cards made up by moo.com and they’ve come out quite well; good quality printing and pretty cheap. You can add as many images as you want and they’re on nice thick card. Everyone can take away a little bit of artwork at least! I can see some images are too dark but I’ll bear that in mind when I do some more.

Got a very basic website up and running too which I put together with Squarespace. Again, cheap and also simple enough that even a techno-dunce like me could work it out. It needs a lot of tweaking and will change quite a bit after the show but I wanted something functioning for the exhibition, so you can see it as it is at the moment here.

I’ve decided i’m going to add this triptych I did in 2012 – some of my rock climbing friends are coming! – which I think will look ok on the gallery wall.

The Guardians, acrylic on linen, 2012

Collecting the pics from the framers tomorrow so fingers crossed it all looks fine and dandy 🙂

I made a few more of these lighthouse collage studies this morning – it’s become a kind of pre-breakfast meditation this week – and then, rifling through my bookshelf, found some lighthouse drawings I’d made in an old sketchbook that had survived since 1994. They remind me that the current pre-occupation is not new; I’d obviously been curious about these structures in the past too.

1994 was a time when I was I was in my late ’20s and living in London. I’d never done any formal art study after ‘A’ levels; I’d narrowly scraped a pass in Art, with a grade ‘E’ so didn’t think this was a direction I should be going in although it was what I loved doing. But after I’d settled down back in the UK after a few years teaching English abroad, I started to think about drawing and painting again so I enrolled on the City Lit Art Foundation course. These sketches are from that period, when I was drawing again quite a bit. Sadly, life upheavals got in the way and I never finished the course or took my artwork any further at the time. I’m glad I found these old sketchbooks, though, the drawing practice back then was all useful work!

Here are some more studies from this morning:

i got up this morning and started playing around with these again. You don’t really have to think doing them, it’s a good way of getting loosened up  – and a good way of getting into the day and getting the creative juices flowing before moving onto some bigger work that requires a bit more thought!

After making the little folding sketchbook about lighthouses last week I started to think about making some bigger paintings and collages about lighthouses; they are such great dramatic shapes and they’re often built in beautiful dramatic locations around the coast. Now I’ve started looking at them I’m being drawn to them in a big way. To get some ideas flowing I’ve taken the detritus left over from making the book and very quickly made some studies. These mainly use the stencils, both the negative and positive elements that I used in making the images for the book and also the pieces of paper that I put on my table when I was painting to give me a clean and clear surface to work on. These leftovers can throw up real gems of texture and pattern to work with. Each study took a maximum of 20 seconds to do but they are such fun I could sit and make them all day.I

They also provide a useful jumping off point to put together some bigger, more considered paintings and collages – the challenge is to keep the freshness of the little studies intact – we’ll see how I get on!

Sea Songs 1 – Houses of Light, side 2 

Finished the ‘night-time’ side of the folding sketchbook today. I’ve noted that as I worked through the pages, making a series of images of the same subject my approach developed, I loosened up and in fact the final image I made of Stoer Head lighthouse is my favourite. It might be worth using this learning in my paintings, to make a series, very quickly in succession and see what happens. Just the cover of the book to do now and then it’s finished.

Stoer Lighthouse

Here are a few more images of the finished pages:

In the upcoming exhibition, I’m showing a folding sketchbook I made last year, Hedgecrows, and I wanted to do another so I could show a pair which I thought would look better than one sat alone on a table. Here’s a link to a post of that book again which used a collage technique to make most of the images.

I don’t think these will be for sale, but I enjoy making them and it’ll be good to show them with the paintings and collages too, hopefully it’ll make the show a bit more interesting!

I’m showing some work soon at The Horsebridge Centre in Whitstable in a group show with two friends and fellow artists, Phil Gomm and Phill Hosking.

The details are as follows and we’re having drinks and nibbles from 3pm on Saturday 21st Feb. – if you fancy coming along, it would be great to see you!

PH+PG+PC

18th February – 24th February.

The Horsebridge Centre, 11 Horsebridge Road, Whitstable CT5 1AF.

Tel. 01227 281174.

Here are a few of the Images I’ll be showing:

The Great Oak, mixed media on paper, 20cms. x 30cms., 2014

The Haunted House, mixed media on paper, 15cms. x 20 cms., 2014

Nightwatch, acrylic & collage on board, 15cms x 20cms., 2013

Hedgerow and Bullfinch, acrylic & collage, 20cms x 40cms, 2014 

I’m showing some work soon at The Horsebridge Centre in Whitstable in a group show with two friends and fellow artists, Phil Gomm and Phill Hosking.

The details are as follows and we’re having drinks and nibbles from 3pm on Saturday 21st Feb. – if you fancy coming along, it would be great to see you!

PH+PG+PC

18th February – 24th February.

The Horsebridge Centre, 11 Horsebridge Road, Whitstable CT5 1AF.

Tel. 01227 281174.

Phil Gomm has put together these very large scale prints of our artists statements to hang together along one wall, they should look fab – nice one Phil!

Got one side of the folding sketchbook about lighthouses done. Now the other side is going to be images at night-time, with the lights shining, which is what lighthouses are all about of course, so that might be a challenge. First, a nice sit down and a cuppa 🙂