This month I attended the Henry Moore Textiles private view at Pallant House and then spent a few days thinking about my work on fabric.I have had the idea to reproduce my work onto textiles and then design clothes for a long, long time now, but feel more inspired than ever. Many artists have looked at me with horror when I mention thoughts about this and other surfaces in general. Unfortunately I cant help thinking that this is quite sad as out there are so many beautiful creative outlets beyond the square canvas and the white gallery walls. The moleskin sketch above is the beginning of some fabric ideas which I will be painting in watercolour and then scanning. This will then move me forward with ideas about the final fabric and the repetition of image on material. The images will be traced live on Illustrator and then fed back into my digital diary as vector graphics or I may just scan the originals to leave it more painterly and classic. The essence of everything that I produce is beauty.
Filed under: 1-100 art only, everything , art, business, designer, fabric, Henry Moore, new works, Pallant House, Royal Academy,, surrealist, women
The Oxmarket private view on Sunday went really well and it was great to see such so many people out and about in Chichester on a Sunday! So, many thanks if your reading this! By the end of the evening the wine was making deaf  of course but ……..all in all there were some amazing reactions and a lot of positivity about the show. My husband and I spent what seemed an age cutting out the 200 paper butterflies which circle the paintings and we did almost cry when we started pinning them to the walls earlier that day, realizing that the vision required precision and  blisters, but I must say the final look was grand. Awesome comments in the book as well today including my favorite which was ” mostly rubbish and I don’t know about £350.00 for a drawing but I think £25.00 will do!” anon ………well I only have one thing to say that really! Do come along to the show as it goes on until the 12th august. Here is a little doodle I did on Bank Holiday Monday with a bit of a hangover.
Well finally! It’s taken a lot of tweaking,fine tuning and many , many cups of tea , most of which went cold, but the online store is finally looking cohesive! I really wanted elements of my work to be accessible and therefore a two quid card fills me with joy not dread.I can totally max out on the creative element without the shadowy art critics wailing and winging shuffling behind me with knuckles on the floor and noses in the air! Hurrah I say! I have freed myself at last! The beauty of working digitally of course is that it allows me to work at a phenomenal pace creating a whole series of works which almost seem to take flight as one leads to another! I love the tradition of painting but alas I need to be in such a serene place to be able to pull it off. Layers take days and little faces take hours,oil paint gets on my carpet and the little one bed flat groans at the mess.In between I have to go to work and pay the rent therefore each moment spent releasing the creative energies fills me with wonder.My little cards are now on sale and all need homes:
Well we have officially turned the flat into a production line. Over the weekend my husband and I packed,wrapped stuck folded and inserted 500 greetings cards.
Thankfully, I married a man that does not seem to flinch at 1000’s of flyers laid out in strips over every available flat surface in our flat. Thank god Rymans sell vintage ink stamps with tweezers and teeny-weeny rubber letters! A recent printing disaster turned into a stupid but inspiring venture when the contrast on my iMac seemingly suggested that the online proof that I was sent ‘looked fine’!I therefore clicked ‘approved’ and received 5000 crap leaflets with a visibly missing title.This is the sorry tale of what happened next.
Centre Parcs,Longleat
Armed with a one of those snappy little pencils with an eternal rod of led that you click on demand, I drew these horses in the back of a car.We travelled up to Manchester over the weekend and listened to Lemon Jelly and it all got a bit hypnotic on the way home. Perpetually fascinated by the human relationship with nature, what started of as ‘horse’ became ‘man’. Uninterrupted, undistracted. Jodrell Bank sat like an ugly beautiful thing pointed at the heavens and then the heavens opened up and thundered on the car roof. I went really far away with my pencil and then returned again after completing another drawing of a mermaid come manga character. Motoring sweets at hand, all covered in sweet white dust, it was really quite something. Start new bird panels soon.
The innocuous sellotape which binds us together is a curious one. I’ve been looking at my clustermap and the little red circles which represent someone on the other-side of the world hitting my blog. Thats nuts! So I have decided to post an image which has a tail. The original image was derived from an Ethiopian girl who was photographed carrying a great big fish on her head for her wedding day gift to her husband.I was intrigued by this image and then added the car and a New York back drop. A couple of sessions on the mac playing with Illustrator led me to many reworks and versions but the original is a humble watercolour and carbon paper drawing. Hands up, it was in my more angry days when I was focused on ……………that feeling that something was lost in all of us when we realized wristwatches and T-shirts were being worn in the amazon rainforest. And that standing on a butt at sunset looking over Billings, Montana with Dave, a Lakota Sioux from Fort Peck unified and mesmerized by biblical shafts of light through storm clouds and hearing ‘ You know Jo ….its gonna rain you know I can feel it……….you know how I know ………..my grandfather, he watched the CNN weather report’.
Look out for this little fellow on wordpress
Drowning in a branding problem I have found myself working with a mish mash of different designs and names that have been floating around for an age but nothing cohesive,defined and final.I therefore decided it was high time I created a logo for myself.I wanted it to be linear and have a flow which could represent the graphic and the painterly side of me depending on the products. Something which I can literally stamp on everything I produce. This is the final design – What do you think? It will also be the new online shop front and avatar.
To see a large version click on the Hybrid artist poster page above.
 When I returned home from a walkabout in Montana in 200o after living with the Lakota Sioux tribe for a year and three months I spoke a bit like Jesus. This was met with both fascination, horror, humour and quite a bit of confusion. The adjustment period took a long time to settle and it was forever before I pinged back  and reestablished a link with my former self. I had changed quite considerably and I had indeed left Kansas. I lived in a place where there was an undoubtable sense that a great force or presence was all around you and it shifted into people, objects, animals and land and it really grabbed my attention. By connecting with this –  you were led into a series of pre determined events which only came about if you had understood the ‘event’  which had taken place before hand. Whether that was 3 weeks ago or yesterday,  a random conversation with a stranger, a bird flying over your head, a deer running across the road, a fox sitting in your yard. If you missed that moment of significance or you misread it in some way, it felt as though you were then lead to an alternative life path. 
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