It doesn’t seem possible that Christmas has been and gone and January as well! Here in our area of France they tend to leave Christmas decorations up in January, so for the first time since we’ve been here I left our Christmas decorations up until the Burns Night 25th January as we celebrate that as…
Time flies by at such a rate these days, my last post was in April when we were still running the wood burner central heating and here we are in June, suffering “la Canicule”. I’ve been trying to keep up with the Monday morning drawing sessions, but I’ve missed a few recent ones as something…
Happy Poisson d’avril! After sketching this on the iPad ( with the inevitable inclusion of Gypsy, (and I don’t know why they’re dancing the syrtaki Greek dance, I should have portrayed them dancing the Ukrainian hopak…. that’s for next year’s! ) Anyway, I became curious as to whether other countries celebrate the 1st of April…
I’ve started doing a once monthly course for 4 months, on abstraction with artist Liz Hough, https://www.schoolofpainting.co.uk,. I’m working from the image of an old painting I ruined. ( I have a large stock of those, I might add!) Luckily I took a photo at a stage when I felt it was going in the…
As regards my previous post in October my resolution is completely out the window! I have been busy on Instagram though, here are some snippets of what I’ve been up to the last couple of months. I’ve been taking loads of painting courses some offered by St Ives School of Painting http://www.schoolofpainting.co.uk with various artists,…
One of my first big projects after coming to live here in the early 90s was the interior of a restaurant, which was to be called Les Fresques. It was attached to a Château in the throes of being gutted and restored as a hotel complex. On a previous château commission I had divised a…
Funny how a memory, seemingly unprompted, can suddenly pop into your head. The image of a small incident years ago when we first moved here to the Dordogne, flashed into my head the other day, something must have sparked it but I’ve no idea what. At the time it briefly clouded our rosy romantic city-dwellers vista of…
Another year, my goodness me, 2020 seems to be such a nice rounded figure, yet we had no idea what was coming! My latest painting is this one in varying stages. I don’t know where this style came from, it appeared to paint itself, I wish I had more works that did that for me,…
Well I’ve been away from my wordpress site for a while now, partly because of having a busy summer with holiday visitors, all of whom were French because of Macron asking the French people not to go abroad and to holiday in their own country. Thank goodness this was so because all bookings from would be UK…
As mentioned in my last post, we lost our 18 year old cat Lucy on the 15th April. Friend artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins wrote a wonderfully vivid account of her in his Facebook post today, so I’m copying and pasting that to my blog here. I’ve dug out some photos of her at just 2-3 weeks…
I joined the Isolation Art Challenge because I thought it would be a good way to keep up my art practice. We’ve been doing house improvements recently so I haven’t had much time to get on with anything substantial, and this seemed a good way to give myself a couple of hours of productivity every…
I’ve been rather negligent with posting blogs this year, whatever happened to my intention to do so once a month? One reason is that I’ve had far less trompe l’œil and decor work this year, so I’ve had fewer interesting topics to post about. I suppose I could have been tempted to write about cleaning,…
Amongst the wild flowers in the lawn I discovered this spider with wasp-like markings poised unmoving in the centre of her web; looking it up on the web (!) I found that it is indeed called a wasp spider, and depending on its age it weaves a zig zag design on its web, much as…
In late June I found a wee swift nestling chirping frantically on the floor of my studio. The swifts had made their nest in a hole in the wall outside and somehow he’d fallen through to the interior landing softly on some fabric. I popped him in a nest I’d picked up years ago, and…
I missed my personal target of blogging once a month, never mind I’ll do 2 this month….. that’s if I have anything to blog about! My most recent commission was for a “fresco”, a painting really, but painted into plaster on board which resembles a fresco, so that it can be moved if necessary; the…
Putting my thoughts about classical music into words.
Lily S. May--Life with Art
sharing the creative process of artist, illustrator, and book lover, Judy Watson
Sharing my work and thoughts....
painting...drawing...making small worlds
Essays on Mathematics and Culture
postcards from the hedge - a blog by Phil Cooper
views from the artist's studio.
ARTIST: oils, watercolours, trompe l'œil and design
lizkingsangster 