Oppotunity Knocks

I was never going to make my fortune doing guided tours around my pop-up gallery but I do seem to have missed some good opportunities to make  money, of late.
I've had three separate groups wanting to book Ted Coney's Family Portraits recently and I've had to turn them all away. Either we had family commitments or I was working and couldn't do a week day.
One nice lady wanted to bring her husband as a birthday treat but she promised not to wait another year before they try and book again.
 I've just had a booking for three tours - all on the same day, which I will be able to do. It's from a summer school for French students. I must have done OK last year as this is a return booking.
As I remember, it was very hot  and I had to give them iced water to keep them going.
 

Overdrawn

We've just been to Amsterdam and spent lots of time in all the wonderful galleries there.  One of my favourite places of the trip was visiting Rembrandt's house.
Although most of the original decorations, inside structure and furnishings have gone, they have tried to put it back to exactly how it was when Rembrandt owned it.
The space that particularly intrigued me was his room of objects. Things he had collected and often used in his paintings. Apparently, his collecting got completely out of hand and he spent too much and couldn't pay the mortgage. He end up selling most of them and had to go into rented accommodation.
A salutary thought. Ofcourse I have a room of objects which I have used in my paintings and are shown  as part of my guided tours around Ted Coney's Family Portraits.
I shall need to be careful, though even the puppet theatre only cost £5  in 1970.

The Univited Guest

There is a new feature about Ted Coney's Family Portraits on Spotted In Ely and you can now see it on my NEWS AND REVIEWS page.
If you click to the original version you will see a photo of the labyrinth of mirrors that I used for my painting 'David's Journey' several years ago. It contains the figures of Muffin the Mule and his friends, who represented different members of the family in the picture.
I was reminded of the year I did Open Studio in our house in Great Shelford and I had it on display alongside the painting.
We had two cats then, so I carefully covered the labyrinth with a cloth, ready to open to the public the next day.
I came down to utter carnage. The cats had jumped all over the cloth and broken some of the animals, many of which were made of paper mache and clay. I quickly mended as many  as I could and opened the house  as planned.
 People seemed very interested in both the painting and labyrinth. It was only after everyone had gone that I realised why the cats were so intent on attacking the model.
Inside was a dead mouse which must have experienced a horrible time running along  walls of mirror before it expired.
Did anyone  notice? Obviously to polite to say.

A Yorkshire Connection

I've just had the owner of  the online newspaper 'Spotted In Ely' around  to take a series of photographs for a feature on Ted Coney's Family Portraits.
While in the studio, I explained about the visits I'd made to five Yorkshire sea-side towns last summer, to do research for my latest painting 'Forget-Me-Nots'.
He noticed the names of the towns on the brown luggage labels which are attached to each suitcase in which I had collected the objects.
His eyes lit up, as he too remembered all the places he had visited in his boyhood.
Infact it turned that we had lived near to each other as children, though not at the same time.

Prodigal Son

Recently, we were at Corsham Court, in Wiltshire, which was the home of my old college when I studied Fine Art, over fifty years ago.
I was back to look at some of the paintings in the state rooms (I never did look, as a student) using an old catalogue, friends had given me for a birthday present.
I was particularly interested in the painting 'The Prodigal Son', not so much for its subject matter, but more in the way it was laid out.
It was like a very early comic strip, in that different parts of the story were being told within the one picture.
It has given me  ideas for the composition of a painting I want to do eventually, where Mr Toad represents all the greed and wasted potential that existed in my family.
His downfall and subsequent punishment mirrors exactly what happened to certain members of the Coney clan who drank their way through a small fortune, a hundred years ago.

Strawberries And Selfies

I did a tour of Ted Coney's Family Portraits for some of my lovely students the other week. I hope they enjoyed the experience and they did write nice things in my Visitors book (well they would, wouldn't they?)
They also brought me a punnet of strawberries when they arrived.
I noticed that they took a lot of photos with their phones, both of themselves and the paintings - without asking.
I didn't mind, but no wonder I didn't sell any postcards!

Monkey Business

Seventy years ago I remember playing with a cheap metal figurine, while we were on holiday in the small East Yorkshire town of Withernsea. It rained a lot there.
The object had been bought from a gift shop and was in the shape of  three wise monkeys 'Hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil'.
It sat on a shelf in my grandparents house for many years and eventually my mother must have inherited it. When the house was sold, I finally claimed the object and it has been sitting in my studio for a while now.
It is  one of the 'Withernsea' objects for the new painting I am working on, entitled
 'Forget-Me- Nots '.
You can spot the monkeys at the start of a TV news item I was featured  in recently.
 It appears at the top of the MEDIA page on my website.