Leytonstone Art trail and Pic and Mix

My painting," The Call of the Soul" above is on show at the annual Leytonstone Festival and Art trail which is running at the moment. I have a piece in the Waltham Forest Arts Club group show in the One Stop shop and was part of the E17 designers craft fair in the library at the weekend.

In the One Stop shop,I really liked Martin Adam's piece ."Water lily" a lovely elegant and pure form. Shirley Pountney has a great relief painting on handmade paper using the symbolism of the temple. I enjoyed Roan Allen 's pieces using cows too.


The old Woolworths shop in Leytonstone has been taken over by a large group of local artists for the Art Trail called Pic and Mix and It was great to see the large space being used for something creative. I couldn't help but think how good it would be if the council had the foresight to help develop the space into something vibrant and creative long term. Quite a number of the artists re-used items left behind in the shop or made work in response to the site.




I liked Neil Irons installation, "Standing on one leg waiting for lunch" was a response to his remembering his stint of working in a Woolworth's store on Saturdays. The drawing has one tree for every hour he spent bored standing on one leg waiting for lunch.

The creative use of old plastic buckets as lamps made me smile and around the exhibition were a number of really interesting pieces. The exhibitions are running over the next two weeks.

Visionaries at Wallspace Gallery

I just caught the last day of the exhibition, Visionaries at the Wallspace Gallery near Liverpool Street Station, which was great because it was a really good exhibition. I am always looking for artists who work with spiritual themes, and here was a real collection of different work.
Three artists that I really like, sadly dead now, Albert Herbert and Norman Adams and Cecil Collins but lovely to see pieces of their work here. Norman Adams had his Dark Madonna, a large watercolour, more sombre than a lot of his work. Brian Whelan had a lovely little picture too.

Peter Howson had an amazingly emotionally powerful work of the crucifixtion. It was really good to have such a selection of work that spoke to the soul, and as an added bonus there was a book of some of Norman Adams work something I'd been searching for for years.

Artists Car Boot Fair.

It was the 5th Artists car boot fair recently in part of the Truman Brewery site down Brick Lane.

I hadn't been for a couple of years and there were probably even more artists and people visiting this year. It was a really hot day which meant even covered in sun tan cream I couldn't stay to long, unfortunately.

Richard Clegg had some amazing cacti sculptures in car parts, I really liked the idea, but didn't have anywhere to put them. Bob and Roberta Smith had some of his concrete pieces, like "Art is my airplane"and "Up is the new down" that you could take rubbings from at £10 they were a bargain. Gavin Turk however had works, paper covered with boot prints, which were quite striking but at £200 each were not really car boot fair prices. David Harrison and Liz David had mini skeletal animal sculptures and tree forms which were delicate and intriguing.

There was a good range of cars on show, one was a piece called doubts were visitors could write about their doubts on the car, another had a scaletricx track around it where you could race the little toy cars.

I enjoyed my walk round taking photos as I went, walking along Brick Lane was difficult with the sheer crush of people, it is so busy on a Sunday now.

Waltham Forest Summer exhibition. and May Day.

The Arts Club Summer Exhibition went well. There was a good selection of work exhibited, including sculpture, prints, photographs and paintings. Katja Rosenberg always has some great participatory art work, this year it was on the theme of heros. It was good to invigilate on a couple of days and interact with the visitors.
Being in the park means that if the weather is bad, few people come along, but if it's nice and sunny of course the park fills up and there are a lot more visitors.

The gallery is due to be closed and knocked down early next year, a new building is planned but won't be open for probably 2 years. The whole park is having a revamp, I can't help but be

worried especially by the number of trees that will be cut down.

Last month I was in the park for the May Day celebrations, the Maypole dancers and Morris dancers were there braving the rather cold and windy weather.