Olympia One Minute, Bed the Next

One minute working my socks off at London Olympia, then the minute I start packing up the stand, a pesky bug hits the physical and I am down with this fowl bug that seems to be sweeping everywhere. I end up in bed for the next week trying to recover. Then I end up with the immune system going into melt down and I have, what can only be described as the Bubonic Plague look......not very fashionable at the best of times....However, struggling to keep my composure I am now upright and have avoided the suppine position for a couple of days now, but still unable to speak without a growl.

Some exciting things happening with my art, instead of messing and playing around and making a mess, I have decided to concentrate on my style with colour and looseness and I have gone back to using watercolour. A couple of months ago I managed to get on a course with Jean Haines, whose work I just admire and wish to aspire to. This was the second year I had been on her course, and I didn't quite get it the first year, but it suddenly clicked this time and I was away with my paints and colours. I am so excited about putting my paint brush filled with colour onto a new surface now and really look forward to pushing my barriers even more without holding back the doubts...Jean says enjoy the colour merging, and I do now, instead of worrying about it not working out the way it should, I just let it run and merge...great fun.

I have been offered some exhibition space in January 2011 so I am going to really start building up my style of watercolours ready for the launch. This could be it.........I have hestitantly hung back and just shown pieces of my work at the odd local exhibition, but never felt it was really me and I was just imitating styles and methods, like we all do when we first start, but this has been going on for years with me, knowing that I had the skills but not the inspiration for being totally unique and daring. Jean has shown me a way to express myself with colour and thats a result for me.

Looking forward to this weekend in Leyburn doing loads of walks and taking photos.....also stopping for nosh. A friend of mine is taking the book 'Walks and Tearooms' it sounds too good to be true!

Back with the Living in Colour

Hey I am back, and inspired by colour and water on paper.....sounds mad but I have just returned from the most fab art course and I cannot wait to get and play with the art brush and paper and just let the colour and water do its own thing. It seems a long time since I last did a blog, but I seemed to put my art on hold until I found some excitement with doing art, and instead of placing myself under pressure and saying, "this afternoon I am going to produce a picture of a horse" etc and then producing absolutely nothing that registered a horse but just a tight picture of something I did not enjoy doing........soooooo I am back in full colour and going for gold, or pink or blue........ummm.
Well if Jean Haines reads this, I think she will understand where I am coming from......I attended her 2 day course last year in Hampshire and quite frankly I just did not get it....in terms of playing and relaxing, but decided not to give up and try and see if I had moved on with my art over the last year and see if I could just doodle with my paint brush and colour.......WoW it worked - I am inspired in Living Colour.  I have chosen the above image, as today, its this colour combination I am playing around with. Not too seriously but just watching the paper and colour move around.
If you are interested in the freedom of art just look at Jean Haines work on her site.

Technicalities and The Big Cheese!

Where do I start, bought a new PC system with a terabyte of hard drive with 8mb working ram....sounds great! Reason for purchasing new system was I was hounded by the words on the screen "low on memory please turn off some of your windows" Thats OK if you have loads open but just using Outlook, I found this a bit of a joke.
This last two weeks have been quite traumatic with the change over to Windows 7 which is great, from XP but the biggest blow to the bank balance was to discover that Photoshop CS4 was an illegal copy which I had purchased, via a very reliable source and had been using this on two PC's in the office successfully for over a year. Then to find out that CS5 has just been released and I have to pay full price yet again from Adobe for the use of!!Arghhhh.
Needless to say, I am still waiting for the arrival of the CS4 so I can continue with my printing of art work.
Oh yes, nearly forgot, I was shocked to find just working in Dreamweaver that my new PC shouts and says I am low on memory!!
Maybe its not the PC that's low on memory - its psychic and senses I am loosing my marbles!!

THE GOOSE IS GETTING FAT

Oh dear, the chocolate has got to me again, ah well it was nice while it lasted, and it didn't last long. However, the egg hunt was amusing and the painted eggs from the children were delightful it was difficult to judge which eggs were the best.

Over Easter I decided to try and do some work sourcing some material for my next masterpiece. Ummmm I love colour and texture but I don't like doing landscapes. So thats where the inspiration has stopped for the moment....I just love doing unusual abstracty things like experiments that have gone wrong and I ohhhh and arrrrh over them because I enjoyed watching them evolve in front of me, but the only things that seem to really sell are my statement pieces like a wolf's face or an elephants ear...strange that....Anyway onwards and upwards and I shall now go back to burning some wax onto some tissue to see what the tissue does...I know, it has nothing to do with painting a pretty picture, but thats where the thrill is, just watching something develop into something that doesn't mean anything.

Easter is Looming and its Eggs and Inches

What can I say, I have been asked to judge the 'paint an egg' competition this Easter Sunday on our small private estate. I can only hope that it is not going to rain, as the eggs are not going to be undercover but on our little patch of trees and grassland in the centre of our estate. The children are going to be racing around afterwards looking for hidden chocolate eggs, so my guess is, the children will not be listening intently to my very carefully chosen words as I am trying to study the artistic developments on each carefully presented egg, they are going to be rushing straight off to gorge down as many eggs as possible.

Easter always brings on calories for me...I just adore chocolate, but so does my waist and the chocolate holds no grudge as far as piling on the extra inches.

Reckon I will just eat what is given to me and then frantically join the kids and run around demented to burn off the calories.
Sorted!! My life is now in order up to the day after Easter Sunday

Not sure what!

Still confused.....my template on the Blog has changed from dark to spots and back to dark again and my updated blog doesn't want to be published....ummm maybe some dark force is preventing me voicing my blog confusion.

I feel its going to be one of those weeks....the diary looks clear but the brain is a bit of a muddle. Maybe it was the smell of the spray paint yesterday in the studio that has muddled the grey matter.

Hey ho!....lets try again

Reconciliation!!! Argh!!!!!

Every year I seem to waver on the edge of patience and madness when it comes to reconciliation. This is my annual year end and to do an end of year bank reconciliation is an absolute nightmare. Maybe its because, this year, my bank has decided to withdraw its services of giving a monthly statement and now only gives them quarterly. Not only that its not even from the start of the month to the end...It's from the middle of one month to the middle of the 3 monthly quarterly month.....why oh why do they do this.

I spent all last week trying to check all entries, going out and coming in...but somewhere along the line either my Sage accounting software has lost the plot or I have.

This made me start to think about a reconciliation of one's life in general. If we tried to balance ourselves on a regular basis, with regards our energy outgoings and incomings, it might make us appreciate ourselves a little more, and allow us to be more selective about how we organise ourselves.

We rush around trying to cope with all life's little crisis's, but sometimes never getting anywhere, like treading on water. Ask yourself, how often have you constantly rushed around treading on water and end up in the same spot each time, or disappearing up some orifice wondering where the hell to go next.

The word 'Delegate' comes to mind....The Accountant can have my computerised accounts, thats one thing out of my way.



The next important thing to sort out is ME. I am not talking about sorting out the ironing or doing the beds etc, I am thinking about how I want the real me to be in this life. All the rushing around we do, we end up forgetting who we truly are.

So that's me sorted then.......errr....well not quite!