Many Things

It has been a long time since my last update. I hadn't realised how long it had been.

Well since that last update many things have happened and if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you may have heard something about them all.

Soon I will be jetting off to the exotic east coast. Southwold on the Suffolk coast of England to be exact. I visited once before but as I was a tiny tiny child I really don't remember it at all. All the evidence that remains is of me, a push chair and some brightly coloured beach huts in a faded photo.

I am really looking forward to it, it will be a massive change of scene with lots of photographic/artistic potential. I've been doing a little research to make the most of my week as I imagine getting hold of a computer and an internet connection might be a tricky undertaking. Places including the lighthouse, amber museum (the only one in the world!), Electric Picture Palace (with working electric organ that rises out of the floor) and Maize Maze all sound suitably intriguing and fun in a very stereotypical Britain in the 50's/60's way. I will be going with my parents and my sister and her boyfriend but I imagine I will be spending quite a lot of time on my lonesome. This I also don't mind as long as we get together in the evenings. I'm almost considering it some kind of residency, unofficial it might be and I can see myself continuing this current thing with sea related paintings.

I have been doing lots of sea related paintings recently. Since finishing the elephant (more on that later) I have completed the Cowes paintings for the ReOrsa project space installation. I have also completed another smaller work of Cowes. Additionally to that I also painted a work on Cardiff (surprisingly no sea in that one). There's also been a flurry of drawings and as always am continuing the photography. In fact things have been moving so fast that I'm no longer up to date with the website. I think it must be something to do with the themes of my work but the Summer continues to be my busiest time of year unlike, as I am given to understand, most artists.


I have recently been accepted to show my work at the Crocus Gallery in Nottingham and Atelier-East showing in the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Wisbech.

The Crocus Gallery is a volunteer run community space. It runs using an empty shop and does a wonderful job brightening and livening up the local area. The exhibition “Summer” is running from 17^th July until the 7^th August. I'm also getting to show for the first time “London Landmarks” a four canvas work that was one of my most ambitious works in some time.

Atelier-East organises and supports local artists, putting on shows in local spaces including the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. This is also the location of the 5^th Annual Summer show (open, in my favour , to non local artists) in which my work “Greetings” is being shown from the 7^th August until the 18^th September.

As to the elephant, well he did really well. After the miniatures he is also in a book about the London Elephant parade along with all his chums and makes an appearance on t-shirts. Hopefully these links will continue to work for some time.

Book:http://shop.elephantparade.com/

T-shirts: http://elephantparadelondon.spreadshirt.co.uk/greetings-from-the-jungle-I11936293

I went to the herding when they were mostly all together in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. I say mostly because a select few were deemed too valuable or delicate to be left outside and needed to remain inside. They resided at Westfield, London for the duration. Unfortunately this meant I didn't quite get to meet all of them but I was more than happy with the ones I did.

In the end the elephant went for £12500 at auction, helping to raise money for the Elephant Family. The whole event was a huge success with the target of 2 million to be raised from the parade being absolutely smashed, in the end the parade made 4 million quid for Asian elephant conservation.

Whooooo!

It's Not Finished.................... It's Finished

Well the elephant is finished. It was taken away at 8am on Monday and I then proceeded to get back into pyjama bottoms and spent the rest of the day watching Battlestar Galactica and tidying my room. Heavenly. I also made a long list (on the back of an envelope, the best place for important notes) with as many of the things I needed or wanted to do as I could remember.

I meant to write this entry on Sunday night, then Monday but I was so knackered that only on Tuesday I got round to starting it and I quickly abandoned it for more Sci-Fi and some of the more visually orientated tasks on my list. Surprisingly I find the writing as tortured as it seemed when I wrote the first draft is not as awful as I feared, although it still contains much rambling and non relevant material. But isn't that what a blog is meant to be at least in part? I should know better than to watch the same programme all day, my mind will become inevitably obsessed with it and I won't be able to think of anything else except plot twists and character profiles until I have exhausted my supply of it. So while now I am pretty clear of it, back when I was trying to write this the first time I was having to battle my brain to think about art.

Hmm, lets get back to the point of this entry.

So the last two weeks of painting the elephant have been hectic. I have been getting up at 6am in an attempt to start work at 7:30. In practice this has ended up more often with me hitting snooze twice and then not starting till 8, but it's not bad considering. Actually the sheer length of my day from 8am to 6pm reminded me a lot of the last few months of University which is not something I have had to do (and enjoyed) since then. While it was immensely stressful (one can have too many dreams about the elephant getting lost, destroyed or coming alive) it was also extremely focusing and turned into quite an obsessive exercise. However the stress was intensified by the unknown time factors including; sections of detail that took far longer than you would have expected or sections that you expected to take ages was done in next to no time. It made working out how long certain elements would take impossible to guess. It also made when (or even whether) it was going to be finished change on a daily basis. In the end he was finished at about 10pm on Sunday which considering what could have happened wasn't that bad at all.

Ahh no matter! It is done now and I'm pretty damn pleased with him. There are still aspects to him I think I could have done better, but isn't that always the case? Plus he came together as a coherent whole which, considering that I was working from drawings and an image in my head on a 3D and (to say the least) unusual surface rather than a photograph on a flat canvas as I am used to, was wonderful. Oddly I wasn't even that wrenched to see him go. The studio has space in it again and I was glad to have it all finished. I'm looking forward to seeing him in situ more than I am sad to see him go. In fact strangely enough it was my mother that was most upset to see him go. Go figure. Apparently she's going to miss seeing him stare from out of the conservatory at her in the mornings.

Below is an image of the both of us together, taken when the men came to pick him up. I'm not sure what possessed us to have him facing backwards but it was at 8am so maybe me and my Dad were still half asleep. There are a ton of other photos on the Flickr set I made for him here is the link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noblueskies/sets/72157623599724090/

PS: You get geek points if you recognise and laugh at the title.

(I think I used too many brackets in this post)

Arggg!

Arggg!

Less writing, more painting

So there really is little to say about the elephant this time. I have been working hard on it, in fact more so than before as I have been trying to stretch as much painting time into the day as possible. Only about a week ago I had my finish date fixed (8^th March) and there is still a fair bit to do, I really hope I won't have to pull a few all nighters to try to get it done. When it was arranged it seemed like a fair amount of time and enough to get what looks to be very little done, unfortunately it is also some of the trickiest and most detailed work. I am also slightly concerned that I don't like some bits of the most recent developments, granted they are unfinished but still when they are done I doubt I will have any time to paint over or redo them. Scary stuff all and all and 'The Fear' has definitely set in, I am even considering get up at 6:00am so I can start working at 7:30 tomorrow. Yes I am MAD, this is evidence of the sheer level of fear I am under.

Anyway here are the most recent photos.

'Phant-tastic

So I promised another posting on the elephant in my previous blog post. But alas I find myself with very little to say. It has been going well and the increase in daylight hours has been quite a shock to me truth be told, so now I am happily working till 4:30pm when before I could barely get myself going again after lunch (knowing I would have only an hour at best to work in).

So the elephant, well it is resplendent in various shades of green. I have got to about the belly level although there are still aspects that I need to get back to. It is a process of layering, taking the furthest away points in a scene and painting them first then working forward remembering to put down enough base colours so that I don't stall myself. And while this was prevalent during the last posting I have worked into quite a good system and am surprising myself with how much I get done.

The trunk is only partially finished as of yet and while I ache to get on with these little flowers I have other more pressing concerns that need dealing with first. His eyes I also want to get on with but they also are low priority as yet and I still have the bizarre notion of doing one blue and the other orange that I need to work out before I deal with them.

My mother has become quite enamoured with the whole thing, actually wanting to use a camera to produce images to send to relatives (She distrusts technology and is not the usual choice for wielding a camera). She has even named the elephant 'Edward' and since I completed the mouth area has decided he looks like he is happy about what I am doing to him. It is a little far for me but I don't mind it and I will admit happily that he is starting to look less dopey the more paint is on him and indeed he seems to have developed a smile, goodness knows from where. He will not however be named 'Edward'.

I also realise that I started this post saying I didn't have much to say. I think we will all be glad that I didn't, for goodness knows how long it would have been had I had.

Finally I will say that I have decided that although I like the idea of the grand reveal, there is not really any sensible reason to not show off a little how far he has come along. The pictures range from the last entry to today. By no means exhaustive but a far approximation. I hope to have at least one more entry of him finished but maybe I'll find something else before then. Oh and I should mention that there is a new mini site with elephant info about the parade up now: http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/index.html

Elephantine Update

AHHH! I wrote a blog entry and then conveniently forgot to post it. Oops. Well here it is, revised and updated a little unfortunately you will have to cope with older pictures of what's been going on.

4 days after receiving my elephant I was still drawing in my design! Usually a painting of a similar size to it would take an hour or so to do this so I really wasn't expecting it to take so long. I will admit that without the use of an OHP and having to do it entirely freehand must have put a crimp in my style. The fact is that there is no original photograph, only a roughly sketched design and what's in my head. The design while it took influence from many sources could not be projected well, even if there was room to do so.

Additionally the design requires that each side of the elephant be the same image with a few alterations so I have found myself spending more time walking around the 'phant than drawing on it. Happily I finished the drawing just a few days later and started painting him on day 5 of receipt.


It has been quite a challenge so far, I had not anticipated a few things and they came as a little bit of a shock. For one the drying time of acrylics is very different to oils, far faster and while I had used acrylics before and realised this would be the case I had forgotten quite how fast they can dry. This has taken some getting used to and has forced me to rethink a few minor details. But it has also come as a godsend for (and I know no idea why I didn't think of this) in many areas the paint has required a second or even a third coat to produce a properly opaque and even covering which has slowed me down a tad. But the days get longer and the work is now progressing at a good pace. I actually think I am still on target.


I hope to write another entry sometime next week or early the week after with a photo of an almost (or even finished) trunk, bearing in mind that the entire upper section of the 'phant will have to be done before I even get that far. But for now you will have to cope with the drawn version.

A parade under my hat

OK so the big reveal.. Well if you've scrolled ahead to look at the pictures you may already have a good idea what is going on.

As I have mentioned to many of you insisting on finding out what I have been so secretive about, I did tell many of you about this when I was applying in September time. I know it was a useless hint but I was so excited about it I was half convinced I'd jinx myself.

Well today I had a fibreglass elephant delivered.

As some of you might remember I was rambling at one time about applying to paint an elephant and as some you may have guessed by now I have indeed been chosen to do just that.
I found out in November time that my design had been approved and all that was needed to be done was sort out a few logistics. I also decided then to not say anything until I actually had the elephant under my roof.

Now I have to say although the delivery date had been fixed for about a week, after all this snowfall we'd had I imagined that it wouldn't make it. While I'm very glad it did, the delivery men had a whale of a time getting it through my back garden into the conservatory and even more fun trying to get their van full of elephants back out of my road. Apparently Wimbledon just isn't all that bad snow wise, after this weekend they might change their minds. Unfortunately their early and slightly unexpected arrival caught me alone in the house (unusual with this weather) and sitting on my own foot (literally! Stairs at speed with a dead foot... dangerous) as a result my plan to document the hauling of the beast through the snow was left upstairs with my camera.

So for those of you who still have no idea what I'm talking about.
In the summer of 2010 there will be a parade of elephants throughout London. Approximately 200 fibreglass elephants painted by artists and celebrities will be scattered around the city. Not only creating a talking point and a colourful fun scene but also highlighting the plight of the Asian elephant.

I was privileged in 2007 to see something similar happen in Bath with pigs.

More information can be found here: http://www.elephantparade.com/london/ and indeed here http://www.elephantfamily.org/

And that is all I had under my hat.
Expect occasional photos on twitter and maybe even the occasional blog entry chronicling it's journey from white to glorious technicolour.