Starting the New Year!

By Sally Pudney on 1st January 2019

So – 2019! We get to have another fresh new start – how exciting!

I’ve been enjoying making my art plans for the year during the last few days, and now I can share them with you! Here goes!

Big Painting Project: This year it is going to be ‘On the Edge: the North Sea Project: from Southwold to Southend’. I have recently been feeling more and more drawn to doing some sea and sky paintings, and the jetties and beach huts and associated buildings. Maybe walking by the sea with Graham at his new seaside home has made me focus on the endless variation of sea and sky formation and colour. The photo above taken last Friday is a good example! The paintings will be various sizes but all square. I’m not going to visit places in any particular order, but will visit as many as I can between those two named towns – so it is basically the Suffolk and Essex coast. The big difference this year, though, is that I am not tying this to months or seasons. In fact, I’m not going to start it until April, because I have other plans for the first three months of the year . . . .

The Ridgeway: When I walked more sections of the Ridgeway in June 2018 I collected lots of drawings and photos as material for paintings. During the first three months of this year I intend to get those paintings completed, and then turn all my Ridgeway paintings, plus all the notes I made while walking, into a little book. This will be similar to my existing books on the Essex Wood and Fingringhoe Wick painting projects, using Blurb.com, an online publishing site.

Another Book, Calendars and Cards: Having just completed the final painting in my ‘Four Seasons on the Stour’, I am now ready to start assembling the images, notes and maps to form a little book of that name, again, using Blurb.com. I will also select some of the images to have printed as greetings cards by Dan, my printer at Point Graphics in Maldon. During the summer I will also have calendars printed using the images from the series of paintings ready to launch at my Open Studios weekends during September

Prints: I have been repeatedly asked over the last year whether I ever have the images from my paintings made into prints. Well, I never have up to now, but I feel the time has come! Jonathan Trim has very kindly given me useful information about suppliers for mounts, cellophane covers, metal embossing stamps, and paper. In the next couple of months I shall source all the items I will need, talk to the ever-helpful Dan, and get this off the ground!

Exhibitions: I expect to be showing as usual at the Haylett’s Gallery and the Geedon Gallery during the year, but have not confirmed this yet with either. I will also be doing my usual two weekends of Open Studios in September. The exciting new one is the Sentinel Gallery in Wivenhoe, which I have hired for a week in October, from 19th – 26th. Graham and I will be running a mixed exhibition there a little like we have run arts festival weeks in the past. Some of those artists already signed up are Penny Bhadresa (printmaker), Greta Hansen (printmaker), and Caroline Sullivan (knitwear and silver Viking knit jewellery). I will be showing my own work, and I have four more people in mind who I will be asking this month.

!!!SHOP!!! Yes, I’m going to have a Shop page on my website where you will be able to buy items of merchandise. featuring images of my paintings, directly via PayPal. The page is all ready to launch as I write. What prompted this? – well I kept getting enquires, particularly on Instagram, from people wanting to buy calendars or jute bags or cards and asking where they could get them from.  And it was really difficult, because unless they lived locally I had no way of doing the transaction in a way that was safe for both parties, buyer and seller. Now this new page will solve that problem. I will be able to show items on Instagram and here on my blog, and my lovely followers will be able to buy things they fancy. I plan to have all my little books, some of the jute bag designs, packs of greetings cards, and calendars (from September) for sale, plus limited editions of mounted prints for sale. I’m really excited about this new venture and can’t wait to get it up and running.

Lots of plans, lots of work to do! Hope you’ve got some exciting plans for the year, too! 🙂


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