watercolour

Open studios the next two weekends

| Gaynor's Flora

Spring is coming. At last!

This coming weekend I will be opening my studio during the Chichester Open Studios event. It will be open from Saturday to the bank holiday Monday and again the following Saturday and Sunday.

My pictures will be hung in the conservatory and prints and cards will also be displayed there. Luckily my husband Robin will be manning this area whilst I am down in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

As the event is called ‘Open Studios’, I have the excuse to stay in the shed all day long. I will be getting on with either painting my current piece of work or doing the preparations for other aspects of it.

Normally people do like to find their way down to the shed to see what an artists studio is like. I expect all studios are very different, just as the mess in mine varies according to what I am doing – even though it is generally botanical.

During ‘Open studios’ I can’t say that I work too effectively. I enjoy the visits throughout the two weekends as people are so interested and have so many questions. As I work in coloured pencil, watercolour or graphite, I am given so many opportunities to explain and demonstrate the different techniques. Sometimes, visitors become so interested they want to learn more. This is exciting.

Presently I am working on a series if crab apple paintings. There are meant to be six different crab apples, but my neighbour has just gone and bought a new one which is quite beautiful.

My husband Robin bought me a microscope for my birthday and at last the crab apple flowers are beginning to open, allowing me to capture their detail. Hopefully, more of the trees will be coming into blossom, in which case I will be using the microscope when dissecting the flowers. This might well be art with a difference for those who visit me down in the shed during these next two weeks.

I do hope you will join me.

The address is on my website, but have a look on the Chichester Open studios website for instructions as to how to get here. It is http://www.chichesterarttrail.org/.

I really look forward to seeing you in my shed!

FRom an earlier ‘Open Studios’ event:

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The Artist at work in the shed!

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Subject for next RHS submission

| Gaynor's Flora

As a botanical artist, I have been thinking about what subject to illustrate for the next time I submit my work to the RHS. Having won a silver for my Magnolia series in March this year, I want to choose a subject that is likely to earn me an additional medal. As Wisteria flowered not long after the exhibition, I had thought about plants from the Pea family, then seeing red berries from one of the Nightshade family (Solanum) in the hedgerows, I thought of doing that. I am in the middle of one botanical watercolour painting (Solanum dulcamara), but they have quite a sprawling habit and therefore a painting needs to show this.

We have four crab apple trees in our garden and three of them are heavily laden this year. They too make a good subject. I would have to find four more trees though to make the series of eight.

Today, I have been doing drawings, making colour samples and taking pictures of the fruit and leaves, so that I have something to start with. Hopefully I can add the flowers and young spring leaves to the preparatory work next year. I might do this series in colour pencil.

This means that in fact I have some material already on the go to do two separate series. I wonder which one will get there first?