Posters!

Picked up the posters from the printer, very exciting. Though I must say I was disappointed that my final instruction: please delete thick black border round picture (which was him slavishly following and amplifying my thin black biro drawing of where to place what) and make my name much smaller, lower case, had only been half followed.

Never mind.
Too late, too late will be the cry.
Rather the shouty name than the funereal border which looked as if someone, possibly the dogs in the picture, had popped their clogs.

A Run On the Beach: Exhibition by Amanda White

A Run On the Beach: Exhibition by Amanda White
Here's a link to the upcoming show.
Click to read.

I must say CCN is a wonderful site, a brilliant ragbag of arts news both local and national. I definitely recommend a browse.

A FEW PHOTOS TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF PRE-EXHIBITION PACKING CHAOS!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Slowly, slowly catchee ...

...website!
The reason for the lull in my postings now becomes clear as mud - much grimacing, much swearing and much cold sweating when I press the wrong button - but I really think this time I have cracked it and it may be a question of all systems go on the website front:

 Wooohoooo, that is one scarey looming-out-of-the-ether photo!
So here's another to put it into my habitually cluttered mess of a context, albeit still glowing eerily:

So far I have three-quarters assembled 3 pages and hope to have it ready before I jet off to the UK. I must say I would recommend Weebly to absolutely anyone who is clueless on the technical front, it really is a build-your-own-site-for dummies and looks pretty good into the bargain. Though I could doubtless improve things even more were I to go from Basics to Advanced.
And the great thing is it's FREE!

Five gold stars to Weebly. Even if it is a bit of a "zany funster" word and I have to tag it onto my domain name.

Reality re-ordered

Sometimes, just stumbling around from site to site on the Wonderful World of Internet apart from wasting precious time, you come across somewhere really exciting and thought provoking that sets you off on another series of stepping stones. In the end you forget where you were, which in the case of the interesting blog I came across this morning I have. I shall try hard to retrace my footsteps later on.

But I did note down a quotation that popped up on the first page:
"Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic re-ordering of reality."
I love that. I have inscribed it into my sketchbook
Camille Paglia came up with that gem. I had never heard of her before but will now make it a mission to find out more about her.

In the meantime here is one of my re-orderings of reality, a largish (for me!) (21x26 cms) mixed media on paper which was a take on a tiny (7x10) fragment of another.

My kitchen table industry

I spent part of yesterday resurrecting my cards which had been placed on a very slow back burner some time ago when Life and other things intervened.

It was most enjoyable sitting at the table in the kitchen with my feline helper and my mini guillotine, slicing away at photographs of my paintings, sticking them onto the cards then placing them between books to well and truly stick and flatten them.
Then bagging them up with their envelopes.

My little helper

 A nice shop down in town that sells local produce has agreed to take a pilot selection and I have other outlets in mind.

The trouble is the perplexity with which many (though not all) Spanish people greet the basic idea of a card. Any card. It is still a surprisingly alien concept compared with the UK. The girl on the counter at the shop sounded almost suspicious, as if I were proferring a clutch of hand grenades. "What are they? ... Are they like ... postcards?"

I fear cards, though slowly making inroads, still have a long way to go here before reaching the saturation point long passed in England.

Gulls and Bunting ...

and stress.
A lot of stress.
I am eating too many biscuits.
This must mean something.
It does.
I am stressed.....
About the exhibition.
So of course I paint a jokey picture.
It must be a compensatory mechanism of some sort.
There is probably a word for it of which I am unaware.
Golly, what a miserable post.
I'll shut up now and roll myself up into a biscuit-eating ball.

Bloomin' bougainvillea and some black cats

Lovely isn't it?

There seems to be quite a blossom bonanza going on with this plant round these parts right now, masses of flowers, masses of colour.
Anyway, I took this photo of the overgrown one outside my studio door about ten minutes ago.
A cheery sight in November.
And talking of bougainvillea (however you spell it), here's a picture (getting back to things arty) I did a few years back which features the stuff. And a family of black cats ....

Fun Run

Flat Out, Bracklesham Bay

This is a larger version of a painting I put up here a while back. It was very small and on paper.
This is larger (well 21x27 cms, so you can judge how small the first one was!) and on canvas.

No deep meanings, just hell-for-leather canine fun.

The whippets got their spots ...

They look less ghostly now.

Whippets on the run

I just finished this painting this morning:

I am calling the dogs whippets but maybe they are greyhounds. I am not too hot on canine breeds. Anyway they are the racy sort of which there are a lot in the Witterings area. I may yet return to them to give them large grey spots.

And replace the photo because the ultramarine, though pretty vibrant, is not quite as Mediterranean as it looks here. Much better to take it again on a cloudy day but I was in a hurry to publish it and give it an identity outside the studio, if that makes any sense.

It's got a very clean-cut feel because I originally built up the image clipping out paper shapes and moving them around. I think I have said before how much I love cutting out bits of paper.
Now I'm off to hoover up all the debris and try not to suck up the rejected bits of dogs, birds and clouds that are luking under the table and may come in useful for working out another picture.

Deary me. Is this a proper job for a grown-up?

Red Ball

This sort of showdown is not uncommon on the beach.
Okay, so I arranged it in a decorative way ...
That is my prerogative!

I have been doing a bit of decluttering today ... Possessions are terrible things.
Would that all mine could be condensed into one red ball.

So, this painting is obviously an allegory.
I get it now

All Saints, All Souls

It was the big weekend for cemeteries in Spain. Seldom sad and neglected anyway and always adorned with flowers, cemeteries come into their own during this double feast when blooms are more exotic and flower arrangements even more spectacular than usual as people remember their dead.

Here are some photos I took yesterday in our local cemetery whilst I remembered mine.