Friday 20th February

I started the week undecided about what I was going to do this week. Eventually I decided that if I was painting for Tallantyre Gallery,  who are a big independent gallery that take works from many different artists as well as buying from art publishers. They used to buy from Buckinghams but somewhere along the line had a fall out. I should perhaps do some Buckinghams type paintings.

They do have several Buckinghams artists work in the gallery, including me. They have never had any of my "Woodland Paintings" before so I decided I would do some. My Buckinghams work is in acrylics on board and gets framed but to save framing costs I decided to do some on deep-edged canvas but still in acrylics. Aware that these paintings do take me time to produce,  I started with some smaller 20"×16" paintings. I managed 2 Spring/Summer ones and an Autumn one on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then decided to go for broke on Thursday with a 48"×36" monster. This is the largest "Woodland" painting I have ever done and I must admit, it was quite daunting. I was still using acrylics and knew I would have to paint in layers because of the fast drying time. This can be a problem on such a large area. I was amazed how much I got done in a day. I approached the painting in my usual way but just on a bigger scale. I still have a few hours work to do on it but it will look quite impressive when finished.

Last week I hinted at some big news. I'll go into more detail next week but the list of it is we've bought a house!! After 13 years living here we'll be moving to a little village, South Charlton,  just on the other side of the A1, only about 12-15 minutes drive from Embleton and 9 minutes drive up the A1 from Alnwick. Watch this space...