This year I have returned to Drawing & painting. And Mixed media will feature heavily alongside some small assemblages I shall call them, based on dreams and memories.
Whilst on our two or three month sabbatical in France, at a freezing farmhouse in the Bresse region, with no heating yet we retired to bed fairly early and had Netflix and a drawing pad for company wearing more clothes at night than in the day ! Zero degrees in April when we were there and not much better in September when all the neighbours seemed to have gone south to find finer climes as it was as gloomy and wet this Autumn as Great Britain. So I have been looking at a lot of exhibitions mostly of Landscapes and Gardens, and most recently at William the Conqueror’s Castle or Chateau at Caen, on our return journey through Normandy where we saw masterpieces from the Medieval period to some twentieth century rarities one or two unusual Pointillist nudes by some unknown artists to us, at their Museum of Art. There were one or two Dufy paintings and some interesting religious pictures with an extraordinary special exhibition of a modern painter who we also hadn’t come across previously, a Retrospective of shadowy sombre charcoal like pictures, recently died in sombre shadowy blacks.and taken up drawing and painting again, going back to my brother’s Dorset Garden Festival where he organised 20 or so local and some quite famous Artists from the region of Dorchester and Weymouth Frances Hatch gave a fascinating talk one evening and made me realise what I have been doing all these years was the sort of thing she too was passionate about, picking up the Earth even with a plastic bag to save her pockets or the sandy dust of a pavement especially there near the sea where the seagulls call every day. A walk, before making a painting related to the place where she was about to embark upon a painting for the Abbotsbury Garden Festival. Making her board, before the actual real painting. So I have started doing the same, and yet I’ve been doing. Just that all the time , it’s almost similar to the making of mood boards in our student days, when I was studying fashion and textiles at Basingstoke. I’m afraid I missed the Chanel exhibition in London but I hope to get to the Van Gogh at the National Gallery which is on into next year and also the V& A Treasures from the Mughals
Whenever I go for a walk, I cannot resist picking things up from the ground or a leaf or two, a fruit or a conker, from the path, a beautiful colour appeals to me, or I have my camera, laptop or even mobile to capture the very thing I’ve been looking for without knowing it !