Trips and Packages

I had a trip down to Leigh on Sea on Tuesday to return the unsold work of Richard Baxter to Old Leigh Studios, following the close of the Lexden Arts Festival last Saturday.

Richard Baxter’s beautiful ceramics

Having had a cup of tea and ginger biscuits with Richard and his wife at the studio, I walked along to look at the Thames estuary, just the other side of Old Leigh High Street. Now this is the third time I’ve been there. And so far there has never been any water in the estuary, just vast acres of mud! How very disappointing.

Today I returned the unsold work of Pru Green and Annie Bielecka to Wivenhoe, and took the opportunity to have a look at the Sentinel Gallery’s ‘Dodds & Co’ exhibition, which is on until Sunday, 17th. If features work by all members of the Dodds family – James, his wife Catherine, who is showing some wonderful portraits as well as her ceramics, their son and daughter, James’ mother, Wendy Thomas and her husband, and James’ late father, Andrew Dodds. What an amazingly talented family. The show is on till Sunday, open till 5.00pm, so just time to catch it if you are local to Colchester. Shipyard Studios have also started their exhibition in Wivenhoe today – also a lovely varied show, well worth a visit – and their Wivenhoe Open Gardens is on over the weekend, so lots of reasons to have a trip down there. I thought I’d have a walk along the river as I was so near – and the Colne was also showing very little water and a great deal of mud!

I had two nice surprises in the post this week. My new greetings cards arrived back from the printers – moo.com – and I was really pleased with how they turned out. ‘Two Thames Barges’ and ‘Essex Field Path’ are both portrait format paintings, which I don’t do very often, so they were a good pair to have printed together using moo’s wonderful Printfinity.

Two lovely packages in the post

On the same day I received a package from Hugh Lupton, our Festival Storyteller, who sent me a copy of his book ‘A Norfolk Songline: Walking the Peddars Way’ which looks fascinating, and immediately made me want to go and walk some of it myself!

Hoping to have a walk in the bluebell woods this weekend . . . . .

Hope you have some nice plans too! Happy weekend!:)