Any regular visitors will see I have completely revamped this blog.  I decided this year I was going to devoted my time to relearning how to create using paint and brush.   Well it taken me until about 1/3rd of the way through the year, to get started on this but now I have actually gotten there, I decided it was time to devote this blog to it, rather than create yet another blog.  So in preparation I got all my old posts printed into a book from, via Blog2print .  I have had the book for a few weeks now but it didn’t include all the lovely comments from other readers, so I had print them out. Fortunately WordPress have a handy view comments by page, so I manage to print all the comments a page at a time, rather than each comment which would have been very time consuming.  So today was the day, to delete all the old posts and start afresh.

To anyone who didn’t know, I started out as a painter, beginning with Saturday Morning classes at Camberwell  school of art and crafts at the age of 16 (almost 17) and ended up with a degree in painting from Bath Academy of Art (now sadly defunct)  Unfortunately, my time at Bath was not the most productive time spend and as soon as I left, that was my painting career finished before it had even started.   Since then I have struggled to continue to paint but due to family commitments, space and general lack of effort, I have never worked on painting full time.  In the meantime, I have continued to be creative in other ways with my kids and latterly my beading.  However, in the last year,  with the kids gone from the house, I realised that beading wasn’t challenging me as much as drawing and painting does.

I have no great plans about  what I am going to paint or any great theories.  I have no interest in all this art speak crap that pervades the modern art world and never have done.  My biggest challenge to convey what I see onto the canvas in the way I see it.   Basically I am starting from the beginning, going back to the challenges I met at Camberwell  when I first started painting and drawing.

I have been painting for some months now but basically very unsatisfied with what I was achieving.  Then looking a good friend’s website, Drawing my way around London and another favourite, Hobbs Blog, I realised I needed to get back to basics and that is observing and drawing.  So for the next few weeks I will concentrate on that aspect while continuing with my current painting.

Below is the  first painting I produced October 2009 and then my most current finished piece.