Exhibition at the Watermill Theatre (Inglenook restaurant)

West Berkshire and North Hampshire Open Studios isn't just for May. There are things going on in the background all year round, including a series of exhibitions in and around Newbury. I have been very fortunate; my Cornwall exhibition is still up at the New Greenham Tandoori, and I have just installed some paintings (loosely themed around rocks) at the Inglenook restaurant at the Watermill Theatre in Bagnor.

The exhibition is on until early November; the production it coincides with is The Ladykillers.

The unexpectedly difficult procurement of 30 cm square canvases.

So, I'm partway through a series of (many) 12" or 30 cm square box canvases showing disconnected bits of a town (Basingstoke, where else?), and I run out of canvases. I'm not making them, and Hobbycraft don't have 'em on special offer, so they're too expensive. Off I go to eBay. First order of six never turns up. Refunded without comment by the vendor. Second order turns up yesterday but they are too big - six 40 x 40 cm box canvases. Lovely, but wrong.

I'm waiting for the vendor to respond. Kind of hoping to be told that I can keep the 40 x 40's ...

Cigarette Break

Lino print, 20 x 15 cm

I don't condone smoking in the slightest, but these two characters appeared outside a building on a business park while I was drawing the building and what could I do but include them? They spent a long time smoking their cigarettes - I was able to "zoom in" and sketch them on their own.

More Lino

Top: two prints of the Devil's Den near Marlborough, in reverse (from an ink sketch made on site); one on brown card with white hybrid acrylic (pen) added to highlight the sky.
Bottom left: exercising racehorse, from painting
Bottom right: the Lizard lighthouse, from sketch

Linoleum Castle

This is a lino cut based on an old painting of mine. It's of Donnington Castle, near Newbury. It's back to front, but still looks rather dramatic.

Lino cuts and block printing (I'm going to try wood cuts at some point) are a novelty for me. I did some lino cut printing once at school when I was 15, and that's it for previous experience.

I bought myself a self-contained kit from Fred Aldous, and I've very much enjoyed using up the two small bits of lino in it. Needless to say, there is more lino on order...

Across the Beach

This is a composite of several photographs taken on Portreath beach in December 2012, and painted largely during the last day or two of my Hampshire Open Studio run this year. I mentally enhanced the colours between photographic reference and painted picture, and deliberately left a few areas of natural-coloured linen canvas unpainted.

Across the Beach, oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm

£575
exclusive of post and packaging

Doubly Disjointed

Passing the Ghost Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm Location:  Joice's Yard, Basingstoke On artikinesis	Yellow and Blue Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm Location:  Crown Heights (from the Anvil car park), Basingstoke On artikinesis

Two little squares of two bits of Basingstoke. My plan is to make a square number of these square paintings (4, 9, 16 or even 25... ) to be part of artikinesis's Basingstoke Project.

The series - the piece as a whole - is to be called Disjointed in reference to the isolation of each image and the way in which we (or at least, I) build up a mental picture of a big town: a series of  places that we know how to get to from our starting point, but do not necessarily know how to get from one to the other. Hence, the places are disjointed.