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…
The Isolation Art Challenge continues with 25,700+ members! The organisers (arttutor.com) have ditched the idea of calling the themes Day 1 Day 2 etc, they’re just staying with theme titles. They’ve relaxed the “rules” and you can pick and choose from the 60 themes for 60 days, doing as many as you like or as…
I believe the Japanese have given a walk in the forest the meaningful term of “forest bathing.” As we’ve always had dogs, for the last 30 years I’ve walked, strolled, and, when I feel particularly energetic, even run through our local forest, up to the open fields about 2 or 3 times a day. Now …
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,…
of the new year has passed already; however, rather than think of the speed at which time is flying by, I’m thinking on the positive side: at least Spring is drawing closer. I can’t wait for the cranes to pass overhead and announce warmer weather is on it’s way. Every year we honour the Scottish…
Happy New Year again, I hope it’s started well for you. Christmas is packed away now, here are some of our precious hand-made tree decorations carefully packed in their golden box. Trompe l’œil The most recent trompe l’œil I painted not long ago was a commission for a friend’s big birthday. His children wanted something…
It’s the last day of 2018 so I thought I’d better cram in my last bog of 2018, especially as I haven’t got round to sending Christmas greetings! So here’s my DIY Christmas card to all which is a Happy New Year card too. Print onto A4 paper and fold along the dotted lines. We…
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 