Wednesday 25 July 2018

In The Beginning

Thirty-four years ago  I opened our house to the public to show some of my family paintings during July.  A year later Open Studios was officially launched and I went on to exhibit with them.
I always enjoyed talking about  my work and this gave me the idea for
 Ted Coney's Family Portraits and the tours I subsequently started.
 Last week a chap came to interview me, as he is writing a book on the history of open studios in Cambridgeshire.
I told him how I tried to get the organisers of the Cambridge Festival to publicise our studios in their booklet, but they turned us down.
I got my sweet revenge when, at the end of the season a review of my work was placed within all the festival events in the local paper.

Wednesday 18 July 2018

Football's Coming

Mindful that France had just won the World Cup two days before, I was slightly wary when my first group of french teenagers arrived for a tour carrying a football.
As I always do, I asked them to leave all their belongings in the garden, so as not to knock anything over in the house. I had, only that morning,  broken the glass on a small photograph of Barnaby, while setting up an display for their visit.
I must say, the students were very well behaved and listened intently to what I had to say. It's always a challenge moving seven rather tall young people around the cottage but they did it with good humour on an extremely hot day
Maybe the iced water I gave them on their arrival, helped.

Wednesday 11 July 2018

French For Advent

For the third year running, I've got three groups of French students taking a tour  at
 my pop-up gallery, next week.
I need to keep the explanation of the chosen paintings fairly simple as although they all speak English, some  are quite young.
I want to show  my painting 'Limners' which I hope they will find intriguing. As the inspiration for the painting is an advent calendar I have been trying to get hold of one before they come. As I discovered, July is not the best time to try and buy one though my daughter is also looking to see if she has an old calendar in the loft.
The fact that my painting has 37 pictures may add to the confusion.
You can see the work on page two of the PRINTS FOR SALE page on my website