Nottingham Open Entry 2016

It is that time of year so here this year’s entries in the annual Nottingham Open. For various reasons it may be my last entry for a while because rumour has it the Open will be on hold whilst the Castle is turned into a Robin Hood visitor experience..

Where I will be living by the time that finished could be interesting but it will probably still be within the Midlands ..possibly not Nottingham though.

The reason will become clear in due course.

Meanwhile here the almost pitiful output from this year. What was going to be my great painting launchpad was derailed by some pretty serious PhD submission work.

What here shows work in both acrylic and oil ( thank you Spectrum oil paints however as the website now down and facebook not updated looks like gone out of business which sad….sending me some free paints may have been their last act…)

I started the year inspired by the use of digital preparatory drawings by Dan Perfect in the Castle show. I then developed a sparser abstract mark-making approach out of the digital drawing. Then I turned to oil which by its nature was more viscous and harder to get used to again.

After a cock-up with leaking linseed through using wrong ground with oil paint I repainted the canvases ‘Summer’ and ’96 tears’ again from photographs. These were directly influenced by the lightness of touch of David Jones’s watercolours in the Djanogly show.

At least I have these to submit…not much

but better than nothing at all…