I am surprised constantly by the variety of responses to my work. On Friday night the small exhibition of drawing that I am running this month, at the South Square Centre in Thornton, opened. It is a long time since I had such a rewarding experience at the preview of an exhibition. There were some really warm comments, and by people whose opinions I respect. The great surprise of the evening, however, was the very positive response elicited by the little charcoal drawing that illustrates this post. I reckon it can have taken me no more than about fifteen minutes to do. By way of contrast, meticulous compositions that took me three days to finish drew no such excitement. What is more, a visitor made me an offer for one of the small sketches from one of the sketch-books I’m showing.* Effort and its reward don’t seem to be proportionate. Ah well!
I have been experiencing problems with this website over the past few days. If you are a regular viewer you will have noticed that the layout of the “galleries” has begun to change, and there has been some revision of the text. Sadly, this has been less thorough than I hoped it would be. For some strange reason the site has not allowed me to input new pictures to the galleries, and this is the first time for three days I have been able to post anything in the blog. I don’t know whether tonight is a momentary remission or whether the fault has corrected itself. Either way I am going to get my computer checked over by an expert as soon as I can. My previous post was about “Who would be an artist?”, and I didn’t realise when I posted it how apposite that would turn out to be.
The good news is that I am now well-embarked on a long-overdue revision of the site, which I expect will become apparent gradually over the coming week.
*I’ve decided to include in the display three of my sketch-books, as they illustrate well important aspects of the way in which drawing constitutes an important element of my work as an artist. I have been struck by how much interest they drew.