Spring Forward

What a beautiful spring!

Already my year at the Essential School of Painting is nearing it’s end I’m sure I don’t need to say how transformative it has been. At the present moment I am not certain what comes next but I am excited to invite you to the End of Year Group Show taking place at the Art Pavillion in Mile End Park.

I’d be delighted if you could come along. I will be there for the evening of the Private View and invigilating on the afternoon of Thursday 26th and Sunday 29th. Do let me know when you’re aiming to come so I can look out for you. The nearest tube station is Mile End.

I have been working hard to prepare for the show. These large oil paintings take much longer than my previous works in acrylic, sculpting the geometric forms of the fabric folds and refining the effects of light on them and on the body. I’m continually learning and am excited about some new works I have in the pipeline. I love the way that my tutors critical feedback is so often explained by showing examples of technique from art history. For example, in resolving the edges of this work in progress.

When I was working on the sleeves @guy_allott showed me this:

Yesterday, when I was working on the reflected light at the softened edges of the dress, we looked at Picasso’s Girl in a Chemise and Titian’s Self-Portrait.

Soon we’ll be back in Italy and our first stop is Rome where we have tickets to see the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini.

Reviews have been very favourable and even a seasoned Caravaggio fan like my husband Spike is excited by the opportunity to have a look at several newly attributed works as well as some of his pictures from American collections that have not been seen in Europe for a very long time.

May in Brighton normally involves weekend visits to the Artists Open Houses and last year we opened our house for the first time. I am planning to be back in a year’s time, hopefully sharing the space with two other painters, along with some sculpture by a friend whose work deserves to be much better known. Watch this space!

We’ve managed to visit two open houses so far. The land in front of our house slopes steeply upward, densely patterned with Victorian terraces which wind over the contours of the hillside. Cutting straight up through these is a stone stairway called Cats Creep and at the top is 10 Richmond Road where we visited Roberta Young’s venue. The garden was an unexpected delight on a warm evening.

We also made a trip to David Browne’s Blue Shed Studios in Ditchling. His intriguing works are mostly inspired by an olive grove in the Sabine Hills, an hour from Rome, where he also lives and works. Organic and fragile works are made out of olive pulp paper, with the addition of other interesting ingredients like rust and grape skin pulp. The geometric, tile inspired patterns are accompanied by gnarled, chiselled and incised sculptures in olive wood and large immersive drawings of the trees in olive wood charcoal. We were pleased to find amongst the works a picture of the floor of our local Ducal Palace in Sassuolo.

I hope to see you for my exhibition in June, or around Brighton during the festivities!

Have a great week

Fiona