Searching for the lights...

I'm quite hyper right now because we're off on our next mini-adventure on Saturday morning. We're packing up the car and getting the ferry to Scotland at silly o'clock to then drive for several hours to the very top of the country and staying in a cottage called Ocean View in a wee place called Thurso in Caithness. (I found a some great photos of the Northern Lights taken by a photographer actually in Caithness but didn't want to use any without permission so you can see them here.)

Ever since we went on a Northern Lights cruise round the coast of Norway a few years ago, we've dreamed of going somewhere like Alaska for another chance to see the amazing Aurora Borealis. Well, it turns out that they're the strongest they've been in 50 years and have already been seen in the skies over parts of England which is pretty amazing.  Where we're going couldn't be any further north, as far as the UK goes, and even the moon is in the right phase (waning so that it won't be as bright),so long as we get a few clear night skies, fingers crossed, the lights will put on a display for us!

In art news, I'm working on two pieces at the moment.  The first is a large version of the Rainy Days & Mondays mini canvas I did back here. I didn't want to completely replicate it so I changed the clouds a little and invented a few more rain drops. It's still very much a work in progress as there's a lot more I need to do on it. I'm not sure if I though it would be easier to do it big but it turns out it isn't!

Little and Large - just so you can see I really am working bigger this time!

The second work in progress is from the Windows to the Soul series and is taken from a beautiful photo that Carrie Layne Mashon put on Paint my Photo. This is acrylic on a large piece of wood S cut for me. It's also still got a long way to go.

Credit: Carrie Layne Mashon on Paint My Photo

Horse's eye - Work in Progress

Anyway, I just have to get through one last day at work for a week (yay!) . As always I'm linking to Paint Party Friday (now in it's 2nd year!) and I'll try and visit as many PPFers as I can but apologies if I don't get round everyone as I still haven't packed! By the way, thanks very much to everyone who left me such encouraging comments last week.  I haven't done anything more about the galleries/shop but I will as soon as I get some more pieces finished.

Oh, and if Ileana might be visiting-I can't get onto your blog anymore and I miss your stories! Please change your settings to allow me back in!

A year of parties and a lunchtime of pimping my art...

NYC Rains

Can you believe Paint Party Friday has been going for 1 year? Today is the 52nd week. I joined the party in week 2 and have have only missed about 3 since I think and it's getting bigger every week! Thanks so much to Kristin and Eva for hosting the party every week and allowing us all to 'meet' online and share our love for all things art! Long may it continue because I know it has definitely kept me motivated and I've learnt so much about different artistic techniques that I didn't even know existed!

So, at lunchtime one day this week I decided to do the one thing I really hate about trying to make it as an artist which is actually let people know that my art and I exist! To that end, I went to 3 different shops/galleries all conveniently located right beside/opposite each other in Belfast.

I just like the reflection of the paint tubes here.

The first is a gorgeous wee shop called Utopia.  It's the sort of shop you would go to if you needed to buy a friend/sister/mother a present and needed inspiration.  All quirky little crafty knick knacks and unusual jewellery.  I asked one of the shop assistants whether or not they would ever stock work by local artists in the form of greetings cards and/or little canvasses (thinking of my teeny tiny rainy windows'series).  She said I'd need to ask the manager and went off to get me a business card.  I gave her one of my business cards as well which she looked at and then proceeded to call me Nuala (I didn't have the heart to correct her) and then said ah, that's lovely, is it an owl (it was a close up of a dog's nose!). 

I probably shouldn't have given her the card come to think of it, as I've listed a website on it www.pointypix.com which unfortunately I've been trying for ages to link up to my blog so that I can drop the 'blogspot' part but I can't seem to get it to work so chances are anyone who's ever taken my card and actually looked me up will be met with a website that doesn't exist.

Anyway, feeling slightly less confident but determined to soldier on, Nuala, er, I headed off to the next place which is called the Space Gallery.  It's full of wonderful hand crafted jewellery, cards, mixed media, knitted and sewn crafts.  I asked how it worked and found out that its a collective of creatives that you need to apply to join.  However, they don't really do fine art so it wouldn't be for me, which is a pity.

Still, next stop was the Bradbury Gallery.  This is a gallery/art supplies shop and I love to browse round the art work on display any time I go in to stock up on paint.  This time I asked how artists would go about being exhibited and whether they needed to be already established.  Turns out the gallery goes through a publishing company and I was given their website address where new artists can upload their work to see if it would be considered.  I'll keep that back for when I've done some of my rainy windows and windows to the soul series on larger canvasses and see how it goes. I bought 8 big (for me) canvasses today so hopefully I'll get a start on them soon. 

I finished two Nature's Magic rainy windows this week.  The first I posted on Monday here and the second is the one plastered all over this post in several trying to be arty photos taken by me!

This is another one inspired by a photo I found on a wallpaper website - I think it was the view of a yellow cab through a rainy window so I've called it NYC Rains.  If by some very slim chance the person who took the photo ever happens upon my blog, please let me know so I can credit you for the photo inspiration.

Happy anniversary to Paint Party Friday and thank you to everyone who leaves me lovely comments - I really appreciate them all even if I don't always get a chance to reply individually.

Rainy days and Mondays...

Practising the blurred background at every opportunity!

I missed the Paint Party on Friday. Here are my reasons/excuses: S was going to Glasgow on Friday morning for the weekend so I wanted to spend Thursday evening with him instead of out in my art studio.  Friday morning I got up at 5.30am to take S to the airport and after the worst night's sleep (or lack thereof ) being kept awake with stomach pains, I ended up taking Friday off work sick and stayed home and felt sorry for myself instead.

Rainy days and Mondays

Anyway,  because I was home alone with the dogs, and when one of us isn't at home they tend to follow the remaining human round like little sheep, it was easier for all concerned for me to spend the most of my weekend either walking them at the beach or snuggled up on the sofa with them. Therefore I decided on Sunday if I couldn't get to my art studio, I'd bring the art studio to me, that is back to the kitchen table where it used to be before S got me the studio outside. 

I managed to finished two more teeny tiny Nature's Magic canvasses.  This one is called Rainy days and Mondays because that's what it made me think of with its grey, gloominess and tomorrow is Monday and I'm not looking forward to the pile of work that will have no doubt accumulated in my absence on Friday!

Paint Party Friday...Driving Rain

Here is number three in the Nature's Magic - Rainy Windows series. I couldn't get it to photograph very well - it's a bit reflecty (which is a technical term):

Driving Rain

One of my aims for this year is to build up a portfolio of work and start approaching galleries locally to see how I go about persuading them I'm the next George Seurat. I should probably actually wait until I have a body of work but I'm impatient to get going so I Googled galleries in and around my town and Belfast city centre and started off by emailing one of them who suggested that they are always on the look out for new and emerging artists.

I typed up a big blurb about me and what inspires my work (which I probably shouldn’t have done until they actually said they were interested, come to think of it) and attached photos of my pointy pet portraits, rainy windows and some of my Walkies illustrations (as they also stock greetings cards). I had looked at the work of the artists that they had on their books and figured I might be in with a chance as it was diverse but there was nothing exactly like mine.

Turns out there was a reason for that as they replied to say that they were after a more contemporary style than my pointy portraits so they wouldn’t fit their gallery’s look but that the rainy windows were a possibility, if I ever did them on a larger scale, as the teeny tiny ones were too small to be exhibited. I’m taking that as a positive thing because I do plan to do larger rainy window paintings and I’ll be banging on their door once I’ve done so. I know I’ll probably need to develop a thick skin once I do start contacting more galleries as art is so very subjective and a piece I might be particularly proud of may not fit a certain gallery’s ideas.

Talking of subjective, we discovered a new show on TVon Wednesday night. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist – it’s produced by Sarah Jessica Parker and is based in New York. The concept is that 14 artists live and work together over a number of weeks and have to create their take on different ideas given to them each week in a variety of mediums.

Their work is then shown in a gallery each week and one artist will be let go. Very much America’s Next Top Model for artists. It’s so interesting to see how 14 different artists take an idea and come up with 14 very different pieces of work. Some brilliant, some conceptually brilliant but not that well executed and, some pretty rubbish creatively but coated in enough artistic pretension and emperor’s new clothes ideology to get away with it (which is something that makes me mad, truth be told). For example the guy who was voted best by the judges last night had taken a photograph and blown it up and did a bit of screen-printing over the top – to me that’s photography and photo shopping not art in the old fashioned sense of the world but I guess that’s why art is so very subjective, the judges loved it, so what do I know!

I'm linking as always to Paint Party Friday which gets bigger every week!