I’ve been offered a solo show for February 2012. I’m pleased by the timing because it gives a good length of time to gradually amass work for it. I work on some of my paintings, on and off, for years. It’s one of the deep joys and luxuries of not being a student!
Meanwhile I need to think about a show that’s coming up in June. I’d always planned this one as a chance to give some older work another airing. The trouble is that whenever I say that, I generally end up being unable to bear to show old work, because the new work is always what excites me most. What should I do with the old work? It gets stacked up, taking up space. Of course some can be painted over, some ripped up, but… what about the paintings that lots of people say they really like, and that I think are good. No-one has yet bought them, but they may well sell one day. Oh to be Marlene Dumas or Shani Rhys-James, wistfully I imagine that they probably have someone scuttling around removing finished work and either selling it straight away or putting it safe storage somewhere!
Space pressures in my little studio are intense at the moment, because I’m doing so many different things concurrently… Paintings (several at once) plus all the oil-painting equipment; large drawings, with a broad selection of pots of acrylic, ink, pastels, pencils, charcoal, etc; and then there’s the new portrait painting side of things, with a chair for the sitter etc.
