I was in the studio early this morning starting at 7am. I'm really glad that I sorted my space out at the weekend for the open studios, it meant that I could get on with some painting.
Today was a good painting day. It's strange how some days are good, some indifferent and some absolutely diabolical. Well today just felt right. I worked on a painting that I thought I had ruined and was contemplating throwing away but something this morning made me re-address it and things started to fall into place. I now feel that it has the potential to be quite good.
I decided to mount some of my old watercolour sketches with a view to selling them at the open studios. In my sketchbook where they lived they were just evidence of me working out ideas with paint but once they were cut out and mounted properly they took on a new life and became a piece of art rather than a functional experiment. In fact some of them now are interesting enough for me not to sell. I'm going to keep some to progress into larger paintings.
I'd like to say a big thank you to the painter Michael Porter who kindly agreed to meet up with me yesterday. He is a phenomenal painter and it was a pleasure to meet him and talk about his work/my work and art and the art world in general. I haven't met him before but he is someone who's work I studied for part of my dissertation at University. I sent a speculative e-mail to him asking if I could meet up to chat and I was amazed that he agreed. It's great that established and successful artists such as Michael give up their free time to talk to peole who are just starting out in their art. I would encourage anyone out there to get in touch with an artist that they admire, just give it a try and you might just be surprised by the response.
