Exihibitions and daily painting

I can’t believe that I haven’t updated this page since March 22nd. So much for my promise to myself that I would update regularly. However, I’ve not been idle.

Since my last post in March I was awarded a certificate in Botanical Illustration from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. A course that I’d been doing since October last year.

After many years of trying to be freer as an artist and focus on concepts like markmaking and emotion, I found Botanical Illustration to be much more formalised. Botanical art requires the artist to be much more precise and detailed than I am used to, however it’s been great fun and I learned so much.

Earlier this month I took part in an exhibition with some friends from the South West Art Group – a first for us and a wee trial to see how we got on. We were at the steading in Balmacara again, a great wee venue that I shared with Aileen Grant last year. We were there for 9 days this time and I think we all enjoyed ourselves, made some new friends and sold some art and some cards

I’ve also submitted a couple of paintings to the upcoming summer exhibition at the Torridon Gallery at the end of June, which I’m excited to go and see. But even more exciting and challenging for me are the two exhibitions that I have later this year.

The first is a solo exhibition at Osgood’s Cafe at Inverewe Gardens at the end of June. This has been a huge learning curve for me. First of all I had to decide what I would do for it. rather than just showing existing work I have decided that I would paint everything especially for this exhibition and rather than a disperate selection of work I wanted to do a collection, something cohesive that had a strong connecting thread running through it.

Luckily, because I had just completed the course in botanical art course, I had a starting point and I have painted and drawn, botanical subjects most days and I have, worked on studies and smaller paintings, before starting on the larger pieces, a small selection of which are below:

I’ve also started including more native plants in my landscapes as a direct influence of my botanical course. The title of the collection will be #Flowersof Scotland, if you want to follow my progress on Instagram or Facebook and the exhibition starts on the 28th June. I’ll definitely be updating here with more about the exhibition.

In the meantime I’ll also be adding some of the studies and small en plein air paintings that I’ve painted recently to my Etsy Shop

Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Edinburgh any time soon, my work can still be seen at the Stick Factory which I wrote about last time I posted.

More soon about Inverewe and the Autumn exhibition that I’ll be taking part in later this year.