The Flying Blackbird paintings are now at the Cloudhopper Gallery!

A lovely gallery, well worth a regular visit.  http://www.cloudhoppergallery.co.uk/

Returning to my Food Art journey;  first paintings, then lino prints and then a whole new world of ideas opened up to me. I used my prints and paintings to create picnic tables and trays, using decoupage to add the images.  I was having some serious fun now, creating trays and picnic table tops showing plates of food, and party settings.

The only trouble with getting excited with an idea is you end up with lots of artwork.  The table tops were building up in the garage, and the trays were piling up in my studio.  Obviously, the next thing to do was to find an outlet for my work.

 So far, my only regular point of contact with the public, as an artist, was being part of the Chichester Open Studios Art Trail.  I have been on the committee for this event for 6 years now.  During the first two weekends in May, people are invited in to studios and workshops in and around Chichester, to meet artists, talk about their work, and hopefully buy some!  This is always a really fun and rewarding time.  But not really enough to sustain my profile.

As well as thinking about artistic outlets, I have asked all my aunties and cousins for their childhood cake memories, to start collecting and collating for my Green Donkey recipe book.

Talking of recipes, I am currently steaming my Christmas Pudding, this year the recipe comes from a brilliant war time recipe book from 1946, from the Daily Mirror.  This is a step by step picture cookery book featuring the newly married Patsy, showing how she how she learns to cook during wartime with help from friends and family.  Here is the recipe from that book.

Will have to let you know the results after Christmas day!

So, things I had to do.  Find outlets to sell my food art, and start to put together the collection of recipes.

Back to the present day; tomorrow I go the the Oxmarket Gallery for their private exhibition, as they accepted a large ink drawing from me, for their 'Journeys' exhibition.

http://oxmarket.com/

Here is the picture below which is titled 'It depends What you Call Normal'.

See you next week.

More food images are arriving, and recipes are coming closer (honest)

Continuing my story…..

After painting for a while to combine cookery images and cookery book illustrations, I got really excited with the idea of also using lino-printing techniques.

Again I was working to combine my food images with illustrations not only from the past, but my past.  'Good Housekeeping's Cookery Compendium, 1952' was the start of my fascination with kitsch cookery book photography since the age of 7.

So I  produced a series of coloured lino-printed food designs with copies of old illustrations as backgrounds.

Another great thing about my linoprints is that not only are they fun but you can have a one off piece of original art-work for  less of the price of one of my paintings.

A time begins when madeleines, cupcakes, porkpies and meringues were being created in my studio.

I had a lot of fun with this idea, and great productivity . Several of you who are reading this will have my lino food prints adorning a kitchen wall.  A whole herd of them went to a beautiful tea-room in Devon.


Back to the present, and back to my studio.……
 Just going there now as I am packing two paintings for the selection committee at the Cloudhopper Gallery,  http://www.cloudhoppergallery.co.uk/,   to see if they will wanted in their  Christmas exhibition.

Here is one of the paintings, will let you know how I get on.

More next week.

Having left you last time with my mural painting project, I thought it would be helpful to return for a while to the 'Green Donkey Cookery Book', and its origins.

I left the teaching profession in 2012, having taught for 15 years in 3 secondary schools.  The first 5 as a full time art teacher and head of Department, and the last 10 years working for 3 days a week as an art teacher, to enable me to continue my work as an artist.

Here is a picture of me in my studio, as part of the Chichester Open Studios Art Trail in May, 2012.

I am probably smiling so much as I am looking forward to handing in my notice.

 Looking at the images in the studio, you would be right in finding a food theme occurring.
About 4 years prior to this, I started a body of work where I was combining painted images and ideas with illustrations from my collection of 50s, 60s and 70s recipe books.

Although I love many things connected to being and working at home, I would have gone totally crackers if I had been born earlier. Then I would have been expected to have become a full-time housewife, in a society where men were the bosses both in and out of the workplace.

The painting shown below, called 'Housewives 1', was painted to show how difficult and unfair these conditions must have been for many women who were expected to have no career or expectations beyond their husband, home and family.
This was the start of my 'food art' journey, which meandered along to become the idea for the 'Green Donkey Cookery Book'.

Keep reading, it will all become much clearer as the story unfolds!

This is where I left you last time, with the buttercream hedgehog cake image.  This cake has been baked and tested on 3 occasions, all that needs to be done now is for me to illustrate it!

As this blog is about how a creative life can also hamper the writing of a book, here is today's reason.
For the first time since July, I have spent time today in my shed actually painting one of my own pictures.  It has been so long since this had happened that when I went to put on my working clogs, I had to remove a spider from the outside of one of them, and the inside of another.

Why the long gap?  Well in June I was asked to paint a mural for a cafe.  This was a very exciting proposition, made a little less so when I saw the cafe.  It was a large transport cafe in a lay-by, on the way to Bognor Regis.  And, the mural was to be on the outside. (More about inside cafe murals another time)

As the summer holidays are always a busy time, I planned to start painting in September.  So, since then, on the days when I am not washing spinach and pots and pans and other small jobs, whenever the weather has been fine I have been driving the 9.8 miles to the 'Oasis Cafe'. Arriving there with the aim of transforming it into more of an Oasis.  So today, as the job is nearing completion, I was somewhat pleased to see that rain stopped one kind of play, but also let me do the play I love best (but again not creating any book illustrations, just a dragon painting for Sam)

Pictured above is the cafe before any painting.  Not a very cheery prospect, but wait to see what happens!

A book in the making.

When I stopped teaching, for a while it was a real pleasure just to work in a gastro pub's kitchen, washing up and doing some veg prep.  Friends that were still working at proper jobs were incredulous, but those who had already escaped understood that being appreciated and chopping tomatoes (who do not argue) was a very pleasant way to spend the day.

After a while comes the thoughts about the next creative step, and it was then that I decided to write and illustrate a cookery book, based on the cake recipes from my childhood, in the 60's and 70's. (Idea formulated in the Autumn of 2012) For a couple of years before this, I had produced a body of lino-prints and paintings based around the food of these decades.

These past 2 years have been very busy, and productive, and my book is in the making.  and lots and lots of creative other things have hampered its progress.  The idea of this blog in to ensure I make steady progress (rapid progress would be better, but steady is achievable) but also to show and write about what happens in the creative life of an artist, well me.

To keep you going, I will add a picture of the celebrated 'hedgehog cake', which was made by Granny Beba, to delight us grand-children.  It was a true visual feast, but a real challenge to eat.  Buttercream in abundance is a real killer!  Now, when I make it, it is both a visual and culinary feast.  Perhaps a thickness of less than 2 inches of chocolate buttercream is indeed a way forward!

Watch this space!

Please bear with me for a day or so.  Have created this blog to show the progress of the Green Donkey Cookbook, based on cake recipes from my childhood, and my amazing illustration.s