Happy Holidays

Best wishes to all over the festive season.

See you in the New Year, if not through a little posting in the in-between time.

Environmental Art

Being fortunate to only pick up a slight delay on our flight back from the Netherlands, Amsterdam Schipol Airport to London City, yesterday. I was delighted to watch and be captivated by the skill and grace and resulting snow and ice drawings that the runway clearing team were creating for a bemused audience of weary travelers.

An act of necessity. Clearing the several inches of snow and compacted ice for passenger safety. However there seemed a delight in all of those watching not simply of the reassurance that they will be getting home now. But of a joy of witnessing proficiency in a skill, a servicing of a collective need with a generosity of showmanship; like a main stage Christmas ballet.

The ploughs, sweepers, heavy plant machinery danced across the taxi ways and circled amongst flashing lights in tighter and tighter rotations, circles-of-eight until mounds, causeways and marks in the subtle shades of greying whites revealed an environmental sculpture on the stage.

Can You See The Dogs?

A couple of images from the '@home' show. It has been a successful and fun venture midst decorating and festive madness, and I will definitely do it again and maybe with other artists/makers. Watch this space...

I hung work all around the three rooms of the flat and even the bathroom did not escape a selected mono-chromatic hang!

The dogs were on best behaviour and exhausted by all the attention they got.

Alternative Creative Juices!

So the freeze has set in deep throughout Kent. Country Lore tells us that the best recipe for Sloe Gin is made with sloes left on the bush for the first harsh frost. So braving the snow we went out along our hedgerow and picked a couple of kilos of the little purple frosted gems.

Tempted by further words of folkloric wisdom I am making sloe vodka and sloe schnapps this year. Any excuse to escape the cold of the studio. So the creative juices flowing for me presently are white spirits... (hic)

For those interested the Recipe I work to is:

• 1 litre of gin (generic own brand is adequate! but be aware checkout operators do look alarmed if you buy 30 litres of the stuff!)
• 250 grams of sugar
• 250 grams of sloes, either those picked early and pricked with a hawthorn, left on the bush for the first frost, or picked and frozen in the deep freeze, or picked and hit with a mallet.
• you can add caraway seeds, licorice sticks, cloves, black pepper corns or cinnamon for a spiced alternative.

I will be serving a 2004 vintage of pricked season end sloes on Friday at the show, so mail me for an invite.

Let it Snow... Let it Snow!

The weekend, and this morning again, saw snow fall on our little part of Kent. A depth of white silence covers previously farrowed hills and smaller vegetable beds of swelling onion sets and next seasons garlic.

With the warmth of the studio I am able to look out and feel smug at the dropping temperatures. Like Canute I am abating the creeping low temperatures at the door by means of oil radiator, the life models friend the fan-heater and 10kw from my body heat. However the work is stubborn in it's curing parameters and I find some surfaces still wet. Not put off, rather wishing a chance of climactic conditions to cause accident or a eureka moment I make some gesso and commit to layering up some studio collection squares. The white surface of the gesso smothers the french linen as the snow does to the pebbled driveway. Boot prints, dog hops, skips and jumps to avoid long contact in the depths of the white stuff and bird toes are all the marks upon that surface I can see.

As I start to inscribe the surface of the gesso....

Will this or the wet work be ready for Friday? Invites still on offer for the Private View if you mail me or direct message me on twitter.

Chilly Studio

I return to the studio today after several days of accounting, (Yes it will be posted on the 30th November, Mr HMRC if you read this) and working between Essex and London. I have been offered an artist practitioner role in a school in Essex in the new year, but more of that in another post.

So back to the studio; I find the work I left last week, still not dry. Forgetting the curing time retards with colder, neigh freezing weather, our pond has an inch of ice covering it. So working with the magic of fan heaters I attempt to thaw the studio and finish the work for the show on Friday.

See you in SOHO folks.

Small and Affordable

With a little '@home' show coming up in the next 10 days, time is at a premium. I am having to complete the tiling in the bathroom, so guests have a reasonably pleasant trip to the smallest room of a very small flat. But it is all about the location! or so they say. Charing Cross Road in the heart of SOHO in London's West End. So if you are planning to come to the show you can also;

• Check out the Christmas lights in Oxford Street, Regent Street, Seven Dials (Covent Garden) and my favourites in Carnaby Street
• Book to go ice skating at Somerset House
• German Christmas Market along the Southbank
• Also take in the East London Design show and pick up gift ideas or take a trip south of the river to Cockpit Arts in Deptford
• Lovers can go illuminate the tree in Covent Garden in an interactive project called Merry Kissmas
• and those with kids can pet a Reindeer on the 4th December in Covent Garden Piazza (not the flat)

Is there any excuse not to come into town and come to my show?

Being the flat is so small, work on show will be from the 10x10cm studio collection ranges and small mounted gesso on linen colour studies (as shown in image).

New Tondos (cracked and smooth) will be on the wall along with a selection from the 'crater' series popular at the recent art fairs.

A new earthy palette, of ochre and sepia, small studies and sketches will be present straight from the studio and the trip to Norway. Landscapes and the archaeology of marks prevail.

If you would like an invite to the show, mail me.