Cooler today.

More cloud.

The sound of combines working across the fields.

Raucous crows calling overhead.

The soft susurration of wind moving through the trees.

Two hares chasing each other across the stubble.

I wonder if they’ve noticed me.

They move quickly, playfully, completely absorbed in their own little world. For a moment, I am simply another part of the landscape — a quiet observer sitting with my coffee, watching.

Well… that's a wrap.

My first Open Studio is over, the signs have come down, and the studio now looks as though a small art-shaped tornado has passed through it. Tomorrow's job is tidying up... but for now, I thought I'd share a few reflections while they're still fresh.

If I'm being completely honest, it wasn't quite what I'd imagined.

Friday was hot. Not pleasantly warm, but the sort of heat that makes you question every decision involving movement. The air was heavy, the sun relentless, and if I'm truthful, I wasn't entirely surprised that I didn't welcome a single visitor through the door that day.

(in no particular order… because by the final week my brain had largely dissolved into lists, frame corners, and coffee.)

There is something quietly magical - as well as hugely stressful - about preparing for a solo exhibition.

You spend months — sometimes years — gathering ideas, experimenting, discarding, beginning again, chasing colours that refuse to behave, and trying to coax something meaningful onto the surface of paper or board. Something that you actually like…

And then, suddenly, time has run out and the work has to leave the studio.

Not just the paintings themselves, but the whole invisible ecosystem surrounding them: framing, photographing, naming, pricing, writing, promoting, hanging, packaging, labels… and approximately seven hundred tiny decisions nobody really tells you about beforehand.

Having recently navigated this particular combination of excitement, gratitude, mild panic, and logistical spreadsheetery, I thought I'd share a few things I learned along the way.

Not necessarily in order of importance.

More in order of what floated back to the surface once the dust — and bubble wrap — settled.

We’ve all been there. You meet someone new, polite conversation begins, and then the question arrives:
“So, what do you do?”

These days, I can just about manage to say, without tripping over the words, “I’m an artist.”
It’s taken me a while to get there, I’ll admit. Saying it out loud once felt oddly vulnerable — as though I needed to justify it, explain it, soften it somehow. Now I say it more easily, though the response is often the same:

“Oh, how lovely — you must spend all day painting.”

Not a soul in sight, only the sound of the wind, the birds and the water. Even though the skies were grey, clouds scudding through at a rate of knots, with more than a hint of rain in the air, it was a moment to stop. To step into the slow lane. To watch the clear water swirl, trickle, stream, spurt and gurgle its way down the fell side, over the stones and into the reservoir. Each droplet a story. To watch the ripples tremble on the surface. Timeless. All that it was, is now, and will be again.

I would normally describe myself as an optimist with a healthy dose of realism and a touch of cynicism thrown in for good measure. Most of the time I potter along quite happily, but every so often, something happens that throws me off kilter, leaving me somewhat discombobulated (what a fabulous word that is!!). I know this affects my creativity as my emotional state and creativity are intertwined.

For me, creating art is a mostly solitary business. I am, at heart, an introvert; I don’t like drawing attention to myself. That’s not to say I can’t shout if I have to, or make conversation with anyone and everyone, but just know, that it’s not always easy for me. I have to give myself a ‘talking to’, and haul that metaphorical carapace around myself