This weeks blog will be fairly short as it’s been an incredibly frustrating week. It started off well. I packed and posted my watercolours for Jetty Gallery and had my new Woodland paintings for Buckinghams collected. It went downhill from there.
My tray/floating frames for my Lake District paintings arrived but they were pine and looked a bit cheap. I decided to paint them which made them look better. They actually came with canvases in them but as I had already got my painted canvases I removed them for future use.
Unfortunately when I came to frame my paintings I discovered that they were not perfectly rectangular. The idea with a tray or floating frame is that there is a slight but even gap between the frame and the canvas so it looks like the canvas is floating in the frame. Unfortunately when the canvases aren’t square the gaps are uneven. Although it was only a minor difference it is noticeable and when hung in a gallery, more so. It took me several hours to frame the paintings but I wasn’t happy. I decided I would remove the paintings and find a different sort of frame. I found something possible on the internet and ordered one to try but when it came the next day it wasn’t suitable.
I will have to look elsewhere as a poor frame does devalue the artwork.
I was very pleased to discover that one of the ladies from my Longframlington Art Group, who I am doing a demo/workshop for this Friday, had bought one of my paintings from my website. I was certain that I still had the piece in my studio but after a very extensive search of my now hopelessly cluttered studio, I couldn’t locate it. This is crazily annoying, especially as I can’t recall selling it. As I knew the lady I contacted her and offered an alternative painting. She liked it but decided not to buy it. I will need to give her a refund!
She was fine about it and even found another painting online that she liked. However, it was one I had sent to Buckinghams a long time ago and was showing as “available“ in one of the galleries they supply but like all my work for Buckinghams, I never know where paintings are?
This extremely frustrating incident made me furious with the state of my studio. Earlier in the week a new canvas I was working on and a painting that Natasha had bagged from AITG had been crapped on from above by some creature! I spent a couple of unplanned hours trying to restore some sort of order in there by moving some work out and boxing some stuff up. At least I can now move around in there.
The painting I was working on was one of 4 small(16”x16”) box canvas Croft paintings that I decided to do for Tallantyre to go with the large one they have. I managed to start a couple of these but have to say my enthusiasm had declined by the end of a crap week.
The photo is the painting I’m attempting to recreate at Fridays demo.