Author: Howard_N_Andrews

Having spent some time in St Ives in Cornwall I had lots of photographs and sketches of the rocks in the area. In particular I was attracted to a group of rocks at one end of Porthmeor beach next to The Island. The variation in form and colour of these rocks provides a kaleidoscope of possible images from which abstracted interpretations can be made. The resulting images are very different from those I had found through my close-up examinations of the pebbles and shells of Shingle Street reflecting the different geologies and landscapes of the two geographical areas. 

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives Cornwall

The range of shapes, textures and colours found in the rocks is quite amazing.

Working in my new studio also allowed me to experiment with different ways of approaching my practice and in particular I was able to work with textures much more freely. I was keen to explore the three dimensionality of the rock surfaces and to this end I have been using materials such as tiling adhesive and grout laid onto the support which I then work back into in various ways and cutting through layers of acrylic paint.

Firstly I go through a process of studying all the photographs and selecting parts of the images that I feel could make interesting abstract shapes as I had done with the stones and shells from the Suffolk coast. 

These particular Cornish rocks have strong lines formed by the geological process that have shaped the coastline over billions of years and I wanted to capture this element of their structure. 

There then followed a process of applying layers of tile paste with acrylic paint which is then sanded back and other colours applied to build up the structure.

The final painting:

Porthmeor I – Impact 

Mixed media on canvas (100 x 50 cm)

As a second work I wanted to push the boundaries of abstracting the image in terms of form and colour whilst still keeping the feel of the rock. The image I chose had groups of barnacles at various places on the rock and I used these as a structural element to the painting. 

I also decided to further emphasise the lines and use them to create a more linearly structured image.

Porthmeor II – Segments

Mixed media on canvas (61 x 51 cm)

A third painting was based on a section of the rocks that had a feel of different strata almost like a cross section of the geology with defined lines of separation of the different coloured rocks.

I decided to emphasise this layering by using a horizontal format on a 50 x 100 cm canvas.

At the time there was much discussion about the government’s decision to grant more licences for North Sea oil extraction and this made me think about how the dark stripes could represent the oil-bearing layers beneath the seabed. For this reason I decided to title the work ‘Leave it There’.

Porthmeor III – Leave It There 

Mixed media on canvas (50 x 100 cm)

For a fourth piece I chose a different section of the rocks that was more uniform in colour but which had interesting patterns. 

This section of rock seemed to have a figure with an animal of some sort and to me it felt like a witch with her familiar and so I decided to base a painting around this theme. 

I wanted to try cutting into the base layer of tile cement using some lino-print cutting tools and so used MDF as a support as I was worried that using canvas might be too risky.

Having applied and textured the cement and smoothed the rougher parts using a random orbital sander I cut in the main figure outlines.

I then worked more into the surface before using a dry-brush technique to bring out more of the texture.

Porthmeor IV – The Witch Rock

Mixed media on MDF (80 x 40 cm)

This process of working into the cement then using a dry-brush technique to enhance the textures was something that I wanted to explore further. I had a stock of A3 sized 3mm thick MDF sheets that were sealed and gesso-ed and so I decided to use these as a basis for experimentation. 

Looking through my photographs, there were a couple that I found intriguing, one was a very monochrome image of a group of limpets on a rock and another was an image of coloured stones in a sandy gap between a group of rocks.

Unlike barnacles that attach themselves permanently to a rock and feed by waving fern-like tendrils from a hole at the top, limpets move around grazing on the surface of the rocks. In the image above it looks as if the limpets are contained within a depression in the rock as if they were corralled in a paddock. 

The painting uses the same technique of cutting, sanding and layering followed by dry-brushing to emphasise the texture.

Porthmeor V – The Grazers

Mixed media on MDF (42 x 29 cm)

This image I selected as a basis for a painting for the shape and colour of the stones. I simplified the shapes and decided to emphasise the green and reddish-brown stones to create a more abstract image.

As well as the dry-brushing to give texture I also shaded the rocks to give a three dimensional feel to the image. To paint the sand I tried various methods but decided in the end that I would just have to paint the individual grains separately using a fine point brush and a mixture of colours.

Porthmeor VI – Green Stone Red Stone

Mixed media on MDF (42 x 29 cm)

The day after our exhibition had finished, I heard from my sister that my father had finally accepted that at 99 and now totally blind he wasn’t going to be able to leave the care home and return to his cottage in Norfolk, and had therefore decided to sell it. Given the demand for cottages in Burnham Market we realised that things could move very fast. This had implications for me as I had been using his garage as a studio for my oil painting as the solvents were causing health problems for my partner at home. 

I set about trying to find a studio that I could rent in Cambridge and I knew that St Barnabas Press (a printmaking centre) sometimes had studios available so a quick visit and chat to the owner meant that he had my details if anything came available. I knew turnover tended to be rather slow, so I was very surprised to get a message just a couple of weeks later to say that someone had had to move out at short notice and was I interested? 

So the long story short is that I’m in the process of moving in to my new studio space and really looking forward to being able to work in oils again and also to being in an environment with other artists, including painters, printmakers and a writer, and another bonus is that the print workshop also doubles as a frame makers.

Once we had the posters up and the A board out on the pavement we were ready to open. The first thing to say is that the exhibition looked good, it was the first time that I had seen my paintings up on the wall together and I was pleased with how they looked. The time taken in working out the arrangement of the works using photoshop mock-ups had been time well spent.

The entrance area was set up with cards in the new display racks, business cards and catalogues available and the visitor book on the desk. 

The street outside (early in the morning):

The passageway:

The main entrance:

Inside the entrance area (the blurb): 

The entrance to the main gallery:

The main gallery:

A clockwise tour of the gallery:

And of course ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’:

Once the exhibition was open we had a steady stream of visitors. Over the six days we had nearly three hundred visitors.

The Feedback

The feedback we got from people was amazing. Everyone seemed to enjoy some aspect of the exhibition and the decision to have a joint exhibition definitely payed off. The interaction between the landscape photographs and the close observation of my paintings was well appreciated. 

With regard to my paintings one thing that I found pleasing was that of the 19 paintings on display there were only three or four that nobody picked out as being their favourite one. It was also interesting to see how people looked at the stones and shells I had put out in a dish and then studied the paintings to find the parts that I had used as source material. Some visitors also had children with them and when I pointed out that each of the Shingle Plant paintings had a ‘hag stone’ somewhere amongst the shingle they had great fun trying to spot them – a sort of stone ‘Where’s Wally’ game.

It was also great to chat with some of the other local artists. A local well-known contemporary artist Chris Newson, a protégé of Maggi Hambling’s, came in for a chat. He had had a solo show in the same gallery three weeks earlier which had been very successful, and we discussed how best to run an exhibition. (He related how he had sold a painting to Therese Coffey the environment secretary and Suffolk MP by saying if she bought it he would vote Conservative in the local elections – he didn’t). Chris has his own gallery in Leiston, a town nearby.

https://artistchris.co.uk

It is a strange feeling putting on an exhibition for the first time, the paintings are put up on the walls and people come in to see them and, in some ways, to judge them, and by doing so one feels like they are also judging me. It was immensely gratifying therefore that the first person who came through the door on the first day gave such positive feedback. She was particularly taken with my Phoenix triptych calling it “absolutely stunning!” and we discussed if it was for sale. I had marked it down as ‘Not for Sale’ in the catalogue as it is one of my personal favourites. She had to fly out to Ireland that evening for a board meeting but took my details so who knows? Maybe I can be persuaded to part with it.

The visitor book had space for comments as well as allowing us to build up a list of emails for our planned 6 monthly newsletter. We have also received other feedback via email and text since the end of the exhibition.

A selection of comments:

“Absolutely stunning!” L. McM.

“Fantastic show! Impressive and inspiring works.” N. S.

“Great exhibition” V. B.

“Amazing images” G.B 

“All good work” D.H.

A very pleasing response.

What did we Learn?

The main lesson we took from the experience is that setting up an exhibition from scratch involves a lot of work!

It also doesn’t come cheap, however we decided that this would be a showcase event rather than a shop as it is more important as a learning process and a way of getting known and making contacts, building networks and generally getting into the art scene. As it was it would have only taken a couple more sales (which still may happen) to cover our costs. Also much of the expenditure went on building up the necessary ‘infrastructure’ for future exhibitions such as the display racks, the card payment readers, re-usable frames and the greetings cards which we can sell at other events.

What might we do differently? 

We had been undecided about the catalogue and I feel we fell between two stools, not knowing how many people would turn up we went for the minimum print run, but even then we found that people would use them to look around the exhibition but then put them back when they left. Some people asked if it was okay to keep them and by the end we had got rid of nearly a hundred but that leaves us with over a hundred that will have to go into the recycling as they are all dated and have the gallery logo on the front. Also as they are A4 size people seemed more reluctant to take them away as they were awkward to carry. 

Another time we would definitely have a Private View with a lot more local advertising of the event. As we were expecting the OCA study visit on the Saturday we thought it might be too much to have another event as well, but talking to a few other artists who had exhibited there it seems that that is the time to make the most sales. 

We also suffered by having the exhibition over the one weekend in May that wasn’t a bank holiday. Aldeburgh was very quiet, something that several of the locals remarked upon, the fact that there was no queue at the famous fish and chip shop on a Saturday was almost unheard of! Early booking of a prime time seems to be a good idea.

At the end of the day it was a fantastic experience, and we both learnt such a lot. It has done wonders for my confidence with regard to my art and I have also learnt a lot about what is essentially setting up a business. We both now feel that we can move ahead.

We were not able to get into the gallery until the coordinator arrived at mid-day and we spent the next six hours getting everything up on the walls and setting up the reception desk. The gallery uses the STAT hanging system and was able to provide heavy duty cables for my long MDF pieces, so the potential weight problem was avoided.

The gallery is a ‘white cube’ with plenty of light overlooking the beach and is a really nice venue for our exhibition. We had decided on our hanging plan beforehand and things worked out really well. One decision we made when we saw the room was that we would keep the centre of the room empty and not put the print browsers or anything else in the centre. This worked very well in keeping a sense of space and light in the exhibition and it gave visitors space to stand back and look at the works from a distance. 

Starting to hang the works. The unused plinths were later stored away.

Linda had the brainwave of writing the names of the artworks on masking tape attached to the bubble wrap which saved us a lot of time when packing up.

One slight hiccup was that I hadn’t been aware of the change in wall height at one end of the gallery which meant I couldn’t keep everything aligned along the whole length of the wall but I felt that if I had lowered things to fit the lower portion they would not have looked right on the higher wall.  A second slight hiccup occurred when we hung Linda’s large framed photographs and two of them slipped in the frames due to the archival tape not sticking well enough which required a dismantling and re-framing early the next morning.

The last few days before we were due to travel to Aldeburgh brought frenetic activity and not a few panics. Fingers were crossed as some of the printing timescales were going to be tight and it was very clear that we were going to have to make at least two trips in the car to get everything to Aldeburgh. We had booked our accommodation to start a few days before the start date of the exhibition and this proved to be vital in sorting out the logistics. 

One thing that I wanted to do before the exhibition was to get my paintings professionally photographed to allow for prints to be made at a future date. I had arranged to take the paintings to ‘Little Pink Cloud Limited’ https://littlepinkcloud.com however the person making the booking hadn’t remembered that there was an extra bank holiday for the coronation and so had to delay the session for later in the week, making things very tight for packing up for transport.

Having three bank holidays in the same month caused all sorts of problems with scheduling and it became touch and go as to whether the catalogues would be printed in time. Part of the problem was that we weren’t able to guarantee what space we would have in the entrance hall of the gallery if there was a late booking of the large upstairs gallery room. We didn’t get the final all-clear until the week before our booking and as this impacted on our catalogue this was another source of stress. 

The greetings cards printing was done by SixPrint http://www.sixprint.co.uk/Greeting-card-printing.html who specialise in greetings cards and who offer mixed design pricing on their print runs. This is a great bonus as it allowed Linda and I to get a large number of different designs done with 12 cards of each design at a much cheaper price. They are also very good quality cards and the company supports the Woodland Trust and is carbon neutral etc. The cards turned up two days before we were due to leave and we then had to set about folding, inserting envelopes and putting into the cellophane wraps and sealing for over 500 cards. Family were drafted in!

As well as the eight-page catalogues we also had to get the A2 posters printed together with business cards, these were all done by a local printing company which meant that we were able to pick things up rather than wait for postal deliveries. 

The poster is a combination of part of my Wave painting and Linda’s photograph of The Walker on the Beach. This seemed to work well and we had good feedback about it.

The catalogue we decided would be an 8 page A4 booklet and the printers have a minimum order for booklets of 200.

Front cover – page 1

Inside pages 2+3

Inside pages 4+5

Inside pages 6+7

Rear cover page 8

Business card front and rear (QR code takes you to my website)

Finally we had to wait for delivery of the card readers for our business accounts and set these up, these proved to be vital in terms of making sales as people don’t seem to carry cash these days and even greetings card sales were usually done either using bank cards or phones. We used SumUp as they offer a free business account when you purchase their card readers with no monthly fees and only charge about 1.5% transaction fee. Their readers also have built in sim cards to allow usage where there is no wifi. 

Thankfully all the last-minute issues were sorted and we were able to put the exhibition together as planned.

Having designed our poster it has been sent to the gallery and they are pleased with it. It will be distributed to the publications in which they advertise, these currently include Arts Council News, a-n news, Art Rabbit, Aldeburgh Gazette, Waveney & Blythe Arts website and Visit England website. 

In addition, we have taken a half-page advert in Village Voices, the local magazine that covers all the villages in the Woodbridge area and is distributed to all the households. It cost £50 for the advert but we figured it was worth it for the reach into those homes who know Shingle Street.

This required a re-design of the poster to fit with their size and aspect ratio:

Other admin activities involved finding out about insurance for the exhibition. The gallery covers the public liability insurance but insurance for the artworks has to be covered by the exhibitors. 

I found that a-n members have access to single exhibition insurance that covers things such as damage and theft but also covers transport to and from the exhibition including having to leave the artworks in a vehicle overnight. This insurance is only available for a-n members so it seemed like a good time to join (as a student). 

Hanging arrangements

Having decided to move the two images, the painting and the photograph, that make up the poster into the entrance area the arrangement of the paintings needed a slight change. The wall facing the entrance doors now looks like:

With space for blurb under the two works.

This meant that my triptych can now go in the main gallery room:

And the new painting can go to the far end wall where it fits better with Linda’s photographs:

Update:

When carefully reading through the terms and conditions of the gallery I noticed that the sales counter was referred to as ‘shared’. I contacted the gallery and they confirmed that any upstairs exhibition would also be able to use the counter in the entrance area. They also explained that the wall next to the counter would be available for them to use as hanging space. This means that we may have to re-think our arrangements for that area. They did however explain that at the moment the large upstairs gallery has not been booked for the week that we are there, so the problem might not arise. 

This is both good news and bad news, good news in that we might have the entrance area to ourselves, but it also means that footfall might be reduced if people aren’t passing through to visit the upstairs gallery. They did say that if the gallery gets booked between now and when our exhibition starts they would let us know, but we will have to work out a ‘plan B’ just in case.

This also may change things when it comes to producing a catalogue for the exhibition as we had intended to include a plan of the artworks rather than having labels next to them. 

If we did need to move our works from the wall in the entrance I will have to move my painting into the gallery room.

As the exhibition date approaches more time has had to be spent in making arrangements and sorting out posters, framing, publicity and all the other things that need to be done. This has left less time for actual painting, and also less need to create more works as I already have more paintings than I actually need.

In the past few weeks however I have done one more new painting as it was something that I wanted to include in the exhibition, and I have been re-working another large painting that I had abandoned some time ago. The fact that this work was ‘disposable’ meant that I had no qualms about experimenting with it and this enabled me to work with greater freedom.

The work as I had left it back in August ’22 :

It is painted in oils and on a 100 x 100 cm canvas so I was keen to re-use the canvas if possible. I quite like the combination of the raw and burnt sienna with the grey but the structure of the image felt almost depressing with the way that the bands of colour sank down to the bottom right.

The large area of white at the lower edge didn’t feel right and in November of last year I had done some quick work on it but I was still unhappy with it and had put it away again.

Reducing the amount of white had helped but it still felt very dour. I thought that I would give it one last chance and having looked at it for a while I decided to turn the whole painting upside down.

I also painted over some of the more annoying sections of the painting and increased the textural feel of the image. 

It is still not something that I would be happy with, but it is interesting how inverting the canvas meant that the structure now feels somehow more positive with the bands of colour rising at the right-hand side of the painting. For the moment it therefore has had yet another reprieve although at some point I may decide that this dead horse has been flogged enough.

New work

Linda and I had been working on the design of the poster and had combined one of my paintings with one of her photographs as the main image. This got us to thinking that these two images should be in the entrance way to the exhibition together with a bit of written blurb. This layout seemed to work well and it also meant that the large work that I had originally planned to put in the entrance could now be moved into the main gallery room where it fitted nicely with the other works. It did however mean that the far end wall of the gallery needed another painting. As this wall, which has a window overlooking the sea, forms the transition between Linda’s photographs and my paintings I felt that a more realistic work would lead from the landscape works into the more abstract work of my stone and shell paintings. I also wanted to reference the coastal nature of the exhibition as none of my planned paintings relate to the sea. I did however want to still keep the close focus on place as a concept rather than wide open vistas and so I decided to do a painting of the edge of the sea as it spills over the stones of the shingle beach.

The section of the wall beside the window is 1.3m wide and so a 60 x 60 cm painting would fit without getting cramped. Working in acrylics I used the same technique that I had used with the small ‘flower’ paintings to represent the shingle but on a larger scale. 

My source image was cropped from a much larger photograph:

Although I was using this as a source I wanted to have more colour variation as the photograph tends to flatten everything down. Also I wanted to make a comment about the rising sea levels due to climate change and so I have tried to portray the waters slowly creeping up the beach.

I started with a grisaille over a black background:

Then added colour, shading and highlights:

The exhibition at the Ballroom Arts Courtyard Gallery in Aldeburgh is a joint exhibition between my self and my partner Linda Mayoux who has just finished her OCA degree in Visual Communications and is now awaiting the results from her final assessment. 

Linda has been studying the range of graphic processes that are included in the Vis-Com degree but has decided that for this exhibition she will be concentrating on her photography. For me this is a great benefit as it provides a contextual basis for my more abstract paintings. It has also been very useful as, although I’m reasonably happy working in Photoshop, she has access to other design programs such as InDesign and Illustrator. This means that If I develop any flyers etc. in Photoshop she is able to convert these to print-ready output. I have also now increased my own knowledge about such concepts as ‘bleed’, ‘crop marks’ ‘CMYK’ and other dark arts.

There are several types of publicity material that we need to create for the exhibition, the Gallery has asked for material to be sent to them a month before the exhibition opens as they will be including it in their publicity. They promote their exhibitions in a wide variety of local and national publications as well as their on-line outlets. 

As we were going to be staying at the Coastguard cottage in Shingle Street for a week in March we felt that creating a printed flyer that might be used for creating some local interest. I got in touch with the gallery and they were able to send me their logos to be included in publicity material and I have put together an A6 flyer. We decided that we would get a double-sided flyer with each of us taking one side. Enquiries to a local printer meant that we could upload the PDF file on-line and collect 100 flyers the next working day for £30.

The design for ‘my’ side of the flyer – the actual result was slightly different due to non-availability of all the Apple fonts in the PC version of In Design.

We will be working on a poster image for the exhibition that combines both our work in a single image for distribution to various outlets.

Update:

Having just returned from our stay at Shingle Street I can report that having the flyers with us proved very useful. I managed to make several very useful contacts within the local art scene and being able to hand out the flyers with the exhibition details on them was a plus.

I first visited the Artspace Gallery in Woodbridge which is like the Courtyard gallery at Ballroom Arts in that it can be hired by the week for exhibitions. The current exhibition is being staged by a collector and art dealer Julia Gooch and features a collection of paintings by East Anglian artists.

https://www.artw.co.uk/new-events/2023/3/16/julia-gooch

I picked a time when the gallery was empty of visitors and had a chat with Julia about the exhibition and was able to talk about my own work and leave a flyer and she seemed very keen to get along to our exhibition.

A second gallery in Woodbridge that I visited was Gallery East. 

https://www.galleryeast.co.uk

This gallery is run by Susie Turner and her partner Cathy Doll and represents many of the local and national artists. Chatting to Susie it turns out that they actually live in Shingle Street just a few doors away from where we were staying. Again, having the flyer meant that she said that she would definitely try and get to the exhibition.

The following day was if anything more successful as I had just received an invitation to a private view for the opening of the Spring Show at Caroline Wiseman’s Beach Lookout Art House. 

https://www.aldeburghbeachlookout.com

Caroline is a well-known art dealer and author working both in this country and in New York and the invitation was a golden opportunity to meet her and also have a good look around her collection which ranges from Andrew Marr to Matisse. 

On the way to Aldeburgh I also took the opportunity to call in at Snape Maltings and visit the Maltings Gallery.

The gallery always has several Maggi Hambling works for sale and I was able to talk to the person overseeing the gallery to clarify a copyright query that Linda had regarding one of Hambling’s works. I also happened to mention our upcoming exhibition and it turned out that the woman I was talking to was taking part in a group show at the Courtyard Gallery the week before our booking so she will definitely be visiting our show.

 When I arrived at the Art House Caroline was very welcoming (the fact that I’d RSVP’d to the invite definitely helped) and was keen to hear about my work and the exhibition. She also invited me to join their ‘Art Club’ which organises all sorts of events for artists and also promotes exhibitions etc. for its members (for example in the RA’s magazine listings). Present members include Peter Blake RA, Maggi Hambling, Anthony Horowitz and lots of other artists and writers.

On the way back to Shingle Street I also took the opportunity to call in at White House Farm in Glemham which for many years has staged the Alde Valley arts festival and is the home of Galloper-Sands fine art dealers.

https://www.galloper-sands.co.uk

Again I was made to feel very welcome and they were interested in our upcoming exhibition (another flyer usefully handed out!). 

All-in-all the week spent at Shingle Street has been very useful and lots of contacts made.

In order to work out which paintings will fit on which wall I used Photoshop to generate scale drawings of the various walls of the gallery and placed scaled images of my paintings on them. This has been a tremendous help in visualising how things will look. I used the dimension plan as supplied by the gallery and labelled the different walls A to F.

Linda and I had discussed the layout and we decided to share the space equally with Linda taking one side and I taking the other. So ‘my’ space will be wall A, the right side of the doorway on wall B, the left side of wall C, wall D and the right side of the window on wall E.

This was just my initial idea for the layout and this will change as I complete more works, in particular the paintings on wall C shown above may not feature in this exhibition.

Taking on board the feedback from my tutor I have been making some minor alterations to a couple of my shell paintings. Emma had commented that Shell Storm would benefit from the white lines being a little less overstated and the texturing in the central white and cream area worked particularly well. I agreed with her critical feedback and so I have just made some subtle changes, in particular creating a more textured feel to other parts of the image and also shaving down some of the white lines.

The second painting that Emma commented on was the Shell Cloudscape done in oils on a 100 x 100 cm canvas. Again, I agreed with her comment that one particular portion of the image felt awkward, it had been bothering me as although it was a representation of the actual shell structure it made the painting feel clumsy. I therefore decided that a small change would be beneficial to the overall feel of the painting.

Most of my work using shells has been based on the inside patterns with their flowing lines made up of the thin strata of shell. However, the outer surface of the shells has a different structure that is made up of strong ridges that radiate out forming a protective shield. 

I thought it might be interesting to try working in a more textured way, and having had the opportunity to chat with St Ives artist Stephanie Sandercock while I was last in Cornwall, I decided to use some of her techniques involving the building up of surface texture with material and layering and sanding back acrylic layers on top.

I have been using wall tile adhesive to create the texture which dries to a hard surface when applied over well-gessoed canvas.

As a source image I used a close up shot of one of the shells:

I chose this portion of the shell as I liked the fan-shaped structure and the colour combination.

Working on a 60 x 60 cm canvas I built up the texture of the ridges and gullies:

I used liquid acrylics with an extender medium to allow me to work wet-in-wet and for the ‘gullies’ I first filled them with Payne’s Grey and then ran a bead of Titanium White along one edge before tilting the canvas to carefully let the white run into the still-wet grey.

The ridges were then worked and rubbed back to build up the right level of texturing:

The way in which I had run the white into the grey definitely seems to have increased the three-dimensionality of the painting. I might work on the ridges a bit more to get a greater variation in colour and tone.

As a follow up to Shield I used the same technique on another painting but this has not worked so well, probably due to the less interesting structure and the lack of diversity, and so this has been shelved for the time being,

I have been working on possible layouts for the upcoming exhibition using scale drawings in photoshop and trying different arrangements of my artworks and it felt that things would benefit from a second large scale oil painting to give balance to the Cloudscape painting. With this in mind I have been working on a shell painting based on the inner surface pattern of an oyster shell.

What attracted me to this image was its ethereal feel, it reminds me of an image taken by the Hubble Telescope of the Eagle Nebula (an image often referred to as ‘The Pillars of Creation’). This idea set me fancifully thinking, whilst I was painting, about how the oyster spending its existence in the confines of its shell, might set about creating its own universe scattering stars, clouds, seas and mountains as if it were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, of even a god of creation.

This will need a bit more detail work carrying out once it has dried a bit more but I like the way it is progressing.