paintings prints and stuff

Todays trip to London was great First was the Mall Galleries and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours - an exhibition of contemporary watercolours. We met up with Katherine again. Watercolour here includes acrylics and gouache and there was a great deal of mixed media work involving charcoal or pastel or oil pastel, ink or pencil. No hard and fast rules to stifle creativity here :) Unfortunately they have no web site so it isn't possible to link here to images that were in the exhibition but where I can I've given links to see other work by artists I liked. The work was wonderfully varied - from the super realism of Janet Skea, incredible paintings showing every fibre in fabrics, simple arrangements of delicate objects in a limited colour range, creating subtle and beautiful finished pieces, quiet and contemplative; to the luscious abstract paintings of Morocco by Leslie Goodwin, again with a severely limited palette but this time freely and boldy painted with the ad...

One of my pastels to start off with as the post is about pastels - done plein air at local allotments (plots of land, rented to grow vegetables, home made sheds, recycled baths and barrels and all sort of 'useful' objects). The allotments were only half let - the one on the right of the grass path neatly tended and the one on the left running riot, nature reclaiming the land. I loved the tumble down sheds and junk being recycled and the contrast between the neat plots and the luxuriantly overgrown ones. You can see a lot more of the work that I did there on my sketchbooks site http://www.sitekreator.com/viviensketches in The Dying of the Day. Unison pastels are my favourite as they are lush and velvety but don't break easily - and they come in a great range of colours. On Saturday the pastel society I belong to went to the Pastel Exhibition at the Mall Galleries. I try not to miss it as it’s usually a very good show. Glen a friend and fellow member, and I, met up with Ka...