New paintings walthamstow market and Columbia road market.

I have been busy painting some very small pictures, exploring my Buddhist and symbolic connections in this small scale. I enjoyed taking part of the image over the edges of the deeper box canvases. The images arrived as it were, when I was painting them, changing form a number of times in this process. This can be one of the frustrations in this intuitive way of working, but It also brings I find the element of surprise in the work which I enjoy very much.






I am trying to remember to take my camera out with me, and use it, when I am out and about more generally,like shopping. I do remember it more when I'm traveling around the city, as part of my documenting the public transport journeys I make, but when I pop out to the market etc I can forget. These are a few shots taken last week in Walthamstow market and Columbia road market.

Exhibitions, Friends of the Earth and Leytonstone Art Trail

I had some work in the recent exhibition about climate change, that Helen Porter of Friends of the Earth organised at the Changing Room Gallery last week. It was a good mixed show, with prints, photography, painting and mixed media pieces. I showed 2 photographic works, and the series of work done with Rianna and friends that was in the DecarbonART exhibition at City Hall recently.




I also put up some work in an exhibition as part of the new Leytonstone Art Trail a few days ago. It is a group show of members of the Arts Club and there is a good mix of work there.
It is a new addition to the Leytonstone festival and a few of the shops and offices are showing work and a few artists are showing work in their studios and home, like in the much bigger E17 Art Trail.




The exhibition is at One Stop Shop (Business Centre) 841 Leytonstone High Road,E11 1HH and will be up a bit longer than the rest of the Art Trail which finishes on 13th July.
I really liked Timothy Kraemers photographs of the demolition of a tower block in Hackney. He does a great calendar flip book of the demolition. Shirley Pountney has a couple of strong earth paintings too and Alke Schmidt has her great shrine to consummerism, supermarkets and fast food in the window.

Islington Chapel market and Epping Forest

With two of my themes and interests in mind I was in Islington for one of them, taking photos of street scenes and the market there. It's interesting seeing the effects on me of a lot of recent publicity about photographers being stopped from taking photographs outside in everyday life. I don't find it easy sometimes taking photos in the street, but I do believe that we should be able to do so as artists as well as tourists etc.
It is the increasing money to be made from the ownership of copyright that is causing the problems I think.

Later in the week a friend of mine took me with her to Epping Forest again. It was a lovely day to be in the trees and to see the young ducks and geese on the pond. Taking pictures of trees can be really surprising, when looking at their trunks and branches at first they appear ordinary, yet sometimes in the photograph a spirit type face is looking back at us.

Cy Twombly and Network of Buddhist organisations exhibition

I went to visit the Cy Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern a few days ago. Surprisingly it wasn't very busy for the opening week, but perhaps it's because he is not a household name. For me looking at a lot of the canvases I thought there was something of a dairy feel to the work. Something about recording a particular place or time with words, signs and symbols, emotion and thought.
Although some of the work was concerned with the colour white,( the symbolic whiteness of the poet Stephane mallarme ) colour was also applied by hand and fingers in other paintings, great dollops of paint, drips and smears. Underneath and on top, notation, writings that could sometimes be seen but were often hidden or undecipherable.



It's always good to leave an exhibition with the desire to make work yourself, and with the Cy Twombly exhibition I left thinking about my artists books and a book or page the same sizes as some of his canvases.

Four of my Buddhist works, including this one, Guardians of the Blue Planet, have been down to a conference organised by the Network of Buddhist Organisations and hosted by The Institute of Oriental Philosophy at Taplow Court.
It was an opportunity for artists who are also Buddhist to show their work. I am looking forward to hearing people's responses to the work.