WORDfest

Well, I've managed not to blog for nearly 3 months. I can blame it all on accidently co-organising a literary festival. Although all I intended to do was the logo and knock-up a website design, I ended up doing tonnes including developing a strong visual arts side to WORDfest and meeting so many excellent and talented people.

It became abundantly clear early on in the planning stages that cultural activity of this nature is something people want to support and see crop up in their area. Crawley, was not generally known for its cultural prowess and yet there is a great deal of energy, creativity and talent knocking about. There would be more if people didn't get exasperated at the lack of an interesting and diverse night life and creative vibe in general. But I suppose to get one you have to have the other and what starts first?

So it turns out, a literary festival, isn't by any stretch of the imagination easy to organise with virtually zero funding, but nor is it impossible. All you need is enthusiasm, a few good local and publishing contacts and a punishing work ethic. My brother Jamie and I between us managed to scrape these required elements together and found others of like mindedness to hop on board.

So I think now I have some life back after 11 weeks of serious graft I may now have a wee bit more time to be a workaholic in another direction, oh and blog more than once a quarter too!

Notebooking

Floral Masquerade

Hairlemental

It's official I so love painting hair. Can't deny it. These are due to go up locally soon!

100 Artists for World Aids Day, Brighton 17th December.

I'll be showing (and hopefully selling) some new work at this charity event, it'll be great and lots of very talented artists with their wares.

Art + GSOH = This

Saw this and had to post it, it's by Craig Damrauer, it tickled me, and then made me think, it could always be Modern Art = I could do that, but I didn't because it's pointless, but from there it's a slippery slope into "what is art for anyway" value judgements on quality and skill versus thought-provokingness, like can a can of Manzoni's shite and a beautifully executed and intelligent painting really be under the same banner, and the self-referential in jokes of and about art... etc etc. Anyway, I digress, I found this piece on www.20x200.com a U.S. website promoting affordable art for art lovers everywhere. It's run by Jen Bekman whose promo bags were everywhere at The Armory show in New York early this year. She also has a wee little gallery on the Lower East Side that I visited in February and saw the work of the wonderful artist, Clare Grill below. This lady can paint a damn good cake. Paint and cake my two favourite things! So I kind hit jackpot coming across this, will most likely get me a very very reasonable $20 (£12.82) print!

The Fear is Abating

Well, have just been working on the third painting I've started in a week, it is all but done. The other two are still in progress. It's weird without obsessive planning, and without (much) anxiety I've been able to begin these and they are full of what I've wanted my work to be full of for ages. Reading I've done has somehow influenced everything about them. Maybe my thinking, once given the go ahead with the action of finally working on something concrete, has become useful and implicit, the interesting and arresting things that inform and provide me with the motivation to do this kind of work are there without struggle. As my good friend Sarah often says quoting Bjork "It's not meant to be a strain".