I’ve learnt a lot of new things during lockdown. I’m a much better grower of vegetables than I was this time last year. I’ve had more time to concentrate on the garden, read more, been more dutiful, taken more care. I’ve taken lots of cuttings and had a wee freak-out when I thought my peppers might have fusarium (they don’t). I’ve been picking strawberries by the punnet and and have now moved on to raspberries, tayberries and gooseberries. It’s been great picking lettuce and spinach and the potatoes and peas should be ready any day now. I’ve bonded with my greenhouse.
a variety of green 
peas nearly ready 
ripening tomatoes 
Strawberries and lettuce
My art has been focussed on the garden to a great extent, though now, with lockdown being lifted a bit I do plan on going out and about more frequently, so there will hopefully be some plein air art coming up over the next month or so. I have several ideas for a new series of paintings, but that’s gently ‘cooking’ away in the part of my brain that seems to take care of my creative thoughts and plans.
All my real-life exhibitions have been postponed until at least the Autumn, so I hadn’t bothered renewing my membership of The SAA – a great organisation, which offers discounted art materials and (most important for me) insurance for exhibitions, open studio events and private tutoring. After all, I’m not holding exhibitions, open studios or private tutoring sessions for the forseeable future.
However, SAA are quite persistant. They sent me several emails and a number of letters – it was nice to get some post I suppose! Then they offered me the opportunity to join their sister website, which is an online selling platform called ArtGallery. As an SAA member I’ve been offered “GOLD” membership, which means I’m allowed to upload up to 150 paintings at any one time (I’d better get some more painting done) and (as a special offer) 2 weeks as a featured artist. So I’ve uploaded three original paintings so far (pictured below) each are acrylic on board, 25 cms x 30cms and are on sale for £90 (excluding p+p)
These were all painted in Applecross, one of my very favorite places, last November. The sun rises late and sets early at that time of year and often the days themselves are dark. But when the sun shines, the colours are unbelieveably bright and sharp and that’s what I tried to capture in these paintings
The red shed 
Shore Street, Applecross 
Lochend Cottage
There is some lovely art on the site and it’s well administered from what I can see. For example images are evaluated before they go ‘live’ which I thought was good. It’s taken me a while to understand how it all works – that learning curve I mentioned. This is my page just three images uploaded so far, but I’ll be uploading more over the next few weeks.
Cindie Reiter Fine Art 