Easter Exhibition Update

I am back from Lahinch, the gallery have my new paintings for the exhibition. It is due to open on Easter Monday. There will be four small seascapes and four landscapes on show. The trip was a long one, not helped by a small detour.....un-intentional one, due to the navigator sending me the wrong way at a juction while taking a new route. I am well rested now though, my eyes were very sore this morning, due to the de-misting air coming up into my eyes all the while when driving. With the damp weather, the van windscreen was misting up if I turned the hot air fan off. I am going to take the weekend off now, no more work until Tuesday, Monday being St. Patrick's day.
We party this weekend......

All prepared at last!

All my paintings are ready for the exhibition, I just need to wrap and pack for transport. I will have an early start tomorrow. It is a long drive down, and It will probably be a fourteen to sixteen hour day in total. The paintings look very good in the frames, that final finishing off makes a big difference.
I can honestly say I am pleased with the works going to the show. If they don't sell well I will be extremely surprised!. The subject matter is a good one for the area, and even if I say it myself the work is 100%, both artistically and for uniqueness.

Organising for an exhibition, and considering a painting studio sale..

I have been selecting some paintings for a show from the stacks in my studio. I am seriously considering holding a "Studio sale" later in the year. I have so much stuff to clear out of the studio. Small works and studies I have been holding on to for later re-use or repainting were easily stored in my old studio as I had plenty of space. My new studio however is a different story, I just don't have the same storage. I am due to do an art fair in the summer, but even so I have more than enough work done for it.
I may have an online studio clearance about April, I don't particularly want to frame them for an exhibition, and I can't use my studio as an open studio to sell them either, it is too small for that.
I have to take the paintings to Clare next week, the gallery down there wants 5 or 6 works for thier Easter Group show. I have just finished phoning my framer, I need a couple of the pieces framed in a hurry......as usual he will oblige. :) I forgot Easter was so early this year. Time is flying by........ I hope to get a few sales from the show, the Gallery does quite well, and Easter is a good time for sales as the area gets a large amount of tourist traffic, as does the gallery. If I take a couple of smaller works (24 inches and under) they usually sell quickly, although the big pieces can sell, but I prefer to keep those for one man, or major shows with lots of space available to display. In a group show situation the gallery can only allocate a certain amount of space to each of thier Artists, so larger works mean less paintings displayed for sale.

I haven't been doing much work these last few days, but I did come across this on youtube...

A Painting for St. Patricks Day.

Here is a small study/oil painting sketch of Croagh Patrick in Mayo.

I am selling it as a special for St. Patricks day.

I am only charging $300 for it.

It is an Oil on canvas, 18 inches by 14 inches and I normally would charge about $650-$750 for it direct from my studio. Allow about 10 days for shipping to the US.

Click on the painting for a larger photo.

with Paypal, secure online payments

More lino-cut prints

I have been working on my prints for the Ex Libris exhibition in Belgrade. The theme is to be Lighthouse. I have two works at the moment one based on a wood cut I did earlier with an ogham stone, Newgrange monument and the salmon of Knowledge. The woodcut is too big for the exhibition, it is 12 by 10 inches, but I need them to be 15 by 10 cm, 6 by 4 inches max.

I have redone the block as a linocut, the print I have is not quite right yet. I need to reprint it on a different paper, the other paper I used has too much texture.
I also did a linocut of a lighthouse but I am not really very happy with it. It is too simple and dark.

I am back from my trip to the west. I have not been into the studio yet though as I have been sorting out the garden in the sunshine while we have it. I have rebuilt my stream coming into the pond, moving it from left to right away from the access point to my studio. Now it is working away, just needing the final stonework/rockery to be finished, but I can do that at leisure. Next job on the agenda is the steps up to the boat-dock and window boxes on the studio itself.

I have everything organised for tommorrow, flowers,card, dinner reservation.......it is Valentines Day.....

.........and I am dissapearing at 5 am the following morning, off to the West and fishing on Lough Corrib. She's not a bad wife at all.... Sometimes one has to make sacrifices, it would be a bit much to head down the day before!. I can only go for the one day also as I have to be in Dublin for an important meeting on Saturday.

Apart from that I still have to organise my fishing gear, most of the trout gear is still put away for the winter, and our trip to Amsterdam has meant that time has caught up on me. I will be busy tommorrow afternoon getting the Van loaded and ready for my trip. I need to get all my gear ready and checked in daylight.

Sunlight, water and brightness

I have been busy working in my studio again, but the last two days have been quite warm (about 15 degrees centigrade) and sunny, so I have had the door open and I have worked to the sound of running water in my Pond. The sunlight reflecting in through the windows and the door off the water surface fills the studio with light. Added to the fact that the studio was a gift, it is really a joy working in there. The difference in the atmosphere between it and my old studio in Marlay Park is emmense. I was painting away, the work was progressing well, and I had stepped back to view the painting and I glanced to the right, the light reflecting up from the surface of the pond catching my eye, and I thought to myself, this feels good.

I am working in a beautiful environment, in a studio that was given with kind regards....it has only pleasant feelings. In short it is a nurturing environment for creativity. It was something I was missing for a long time in the Marlay studio. I am looking forward to getting stuck in to a series of work this summer. I hope we get a bit more sunshine than last year though.

I'm back from Amsterdam.

I am just back from Amsterdam. I enjoyed the trip, and the Van Gogh museum, but I found many of the other visitors to the museum were quite rude, standing in front of you while you are looking at works or pushing ahead when there are queues. People can be very inconsiderate at times, but more so when they are abroad. It seems to be all nationalities too. I will go back again though. I did not go to the Reichsmuseum to see the works there as I had promised Christine a shopping trip to spend some of my recent earnings, which she managed to do of course :).
and she saved me over a hundred euro on a pair of boots, they were 30% off.....LOL. We travelled through every shoe shop in Amsterdam, some twice. At least it was only shoes she was buying, we did not have room for a lot of clothing in the bags as we only took carry on luggage, just enough for the 3 days, and she didn't see the Diamond she wanted, just as well.:).

We did a lot of walking and took a couple of boat trips around the canals.

The amount of houses leaning one way or another is amazing. Because the houses suffer from subsidence (built on wooden pilings in the sand in the 1600's) they are often held up by the neighbouring houses leaning into each other. Many roads are made up of higgledy-piggeldy house fronts, leaning forwards, backwards, to one side or the other or even all directions at once!.
It is definitely not a city for a perfectionist......or a structural survey engineer....

We had to take a walk through the red-light district while we were there, but it was a bit of a misnomer as a 'sex shop', you would see more flesh on the beach than was on view through the windows.

The seediness doesn't really show during the daytime, which is when we wandered through, more or less just to 'see it'. Our Hotel was well away from the area, although only 5-10 minutes away by tram, as we booked a hotel on hoofstratt, around the corner from the museums (2 minute walk). Even so we walked into the city center in a couple of hours....there are a lot of shoe shops on the way.... hence the difference between the tram time..... we also walked around looking at the sites and along the canals, the weather was quite pleasant.



Amsterdam does look very grey though, it may be brighter in summer, but I could see why Vincent Van gogh's colours were so dark and brown in his early works before he moved south. I would definitely reccommend the trip as a long weekend, mid-week break, but I would not suggest you try to get all the sights/museums in at once. Prices are comparable with Dublin eating out and drinking in Pubs in the main, but the flowers are a lot cheaper.