This is my final post of 2021 and it had been another bumpy, eventful year with not as many opportunities to exhibit or to attend events.
The year started in lockdown and there were opportunities to be productive and I felt that some of the work produced during this lockdown is amongst my strongest to date. Taking the opportunity to open the house in Brighton for Artists Open Houses was a learning experience and an inspiration to run my own gallery. As the year has progressed I have had to put the Walter Wolf Gallery project on hold for now and I am selling the house and leaving Brighton. I will also be moving from the studio in Portslade which is being taken over by the artist Mike Barrett.
Brighton Station on Monday morning was started in 2019 and then completely reworked in 2021. This is a triptych, oil on canvas, with each panel being 1 m x 50 cm with layered textures created by rubbing each layer back. I have completely overpainted the canvas and reworked it again to get to this point.
I visited the Hayward Gallery in November to see the Gerhard Richter drawing exhibition. This was his first show in a major gallery in London for ten years. The drawings were a mixture of graphite, ink and watercolour and a series of overpainted photographs. I really enjoyed the fluidity and movement of the works particularly some of the watercolours.
I had an amazing trip to Paris for my dear friend Nick Hudson's birthday weekend and we even managed to see some art! I haven't been to Paris for some years but I was blown away by the Pompidou Centre, it is very different to when I was last there. They had a lot of amazing art on show as well as two exhibitions by Georgia O'Keefe and Georg Baselitz, both stunning shows as O'Keefe's detail and Baselitz's direct and dynamic brushstrokes were both stunning to behold.