October – new directions to close the year!

A wonderful trip to the States again in October and this time we (the family) spent time by the coast in Long Island, a favourite destination for the rich and famous as it is a stone’s through from New York.  We stayed in Montauk right at the end of the peninsular and experienced those wide open skies and empty beaches that are all along the coast line of that island. Here are some of the sketches I did to try and express the vast expanses of empty beach and Atlantic seafront.

So, with all those memories of the American coast and the images of downtown Brooklyn, together with the fading memories of the Suffolk coast from the previous weeks I am trying to lay down some images to turn into paintings. I think it has to be the Suffolk landscapes first as I was determined when visited that area that those images would eventually produce a large body of cohesive work of finished paintings.

I was very disappointed to hear a few days ago that my entry to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters was finally rejected – so another trip to the Mall ensues. The next events on the art calendar are a small week-end exhibition at my Insight School to hopefully get some sales, and then another local Open around the end of December arranged by Hertfordshire University.

Good news! The Cork Street gallery will be holding 2 Open exhibitions in 2013 so my entry for the first is rapidly approaching and I hope to submit some paintings based on photos and sketches done at Walberswick. Some images will appear on next month’s blog.

Finally, I was excited to find some paintings of a completely unknown artist to me in the galleries on Long Island. His name is Wolf Kahn, an expressionist painter who has been painting since the early days of the Abstract Expressionism movement that emerged in New York in the late 40’s. I managed to get hold of a book illustrating and commenting upon his output over the years and have just finished reading it. It has awoken a sense of using bold colour combinations in me and made me think that this might be an avenue to pursue in future work. I think a few experiments are called for!