Somerset Art Weeks 2024

As our annual county-wide festival draws to a close I’d like to thank everyone who came out to visit my studio at East Quay Watchet. This year was themed Flux and Flow which inspired me to continue a series of paintings I’ve been working on about our ever-changing and very dynamic coastline, which I witness daily through my studio windows or when I’m out and about on my sketching travels.

Watchet is on the brittle Somerset Jurassic and Triassic coastline that crumbles into the Bristol Channel. The red sandstone and lias cliffs add to the heady mix of the brown-coloured estuarine waters. It’s these colours I explore and exaggerate in my painterly experiments. In addition to local environmental dynamism, I’m interested in bigger issues. Who can escape the ever-present climate change situation something I’ve been thinking about since my geography days in the 80’s and 90’s. So I have been working on my Gaia-themed pieces returning to wider global principles. Mother Earth and the interconnectivity of everything keep my brain occupied, one artweek visitor even commented on my Gaia 2 (Music of the Spheres) as looking like the inside of my brain!

I made an unconventional visitors book this year, inviting my visitors to draw or paint me a circle to make their mark. I’ll publish the results when I’ve counted my grand total of visitors at the end of Art Weeks.

My Gaia costume and Gaia 1 painting featured in this year’s Stogursey Arts Festival in St Nicholas Church, Stogursey. The very fine Norman church interior makes a very impressive and complimentary backdrop for our Hatch Fashion show costumes. Big thanks to Mike Bradshaw and the team who helped us install and who organised the event and made it a great success. Lady Gaia and her Limpet hat are now back in residence in my studio if anyone is interested in making her acquaintance.