I recently had the pleasure of working with photographer Lucy Saggers to produce some shots of me in my studio. It was a surprisingly enjoyable experience; Lucy made the process quite natural and stress free. I will be using the shots for any publicity that I might need for future exhibitions and publicity. The ones here are some of my favourites.
Lucy's work is rather wonderful and you can find it on her website:
http://www.lucysaggers.com/
After a few days away in Whitby for a well deserved break to celebrate Pete's birthday it was back to frantic hard work.
I had a couple of artists over to try and convince them that Facebook and social networking is worth making part of our artistic practice. I showed them what I do, extolled the use of blogging as a way of making contact with other artists; we ate lunch and shared cake. I think it was worthwhile - I have yet to check out their fb pages!
I am trying to complete the painting of exterior door and window frames at our house, plus I had an important Ryedale ArtWorks meeting out at my studio to prepare for, and again for Ryedale ArtWorks, we are working very hard to put in place the mentoring programme, plus planning for our showcase, out of district exhibition has begun. See my blog on Artists Talking for more details:
http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/previewPost/3708982
Which all means of course, that I have not had any real time out at the studio to develop my work. However it will come. . .
I spent a couple of days out at the studio, preparing for the meeting, putting some work up for the first time since my major overhaul and reorganisation:
Most of my work is stored on racks at home, so I had to lug some back to the studio; of course this means I now need to re-wrap it all and bring it back home!
It was worth it though as the meeting was a great success.
Spent the weekend writing the second draft of my Grants for the Arts application. I am still sitting amongst dusty chaos at home, which didn't help and I got rather overwrought during the process on Saturday. However, I turned a bit of a corner towards the end and it went better on Sunday and I hope that this draft covers all the necessary elements.
The form itself is very well designed, with the tick list on the right showing what has been completed, half completed and what is still to do. The help boxes for each section are also very useful. What is not so helpful is the Arts Council web site itself; the search facility was not working and it took me ages to find anything relating to public engagement with the arts, some of the documents in their lists were not available either. Not particularly helpful, but I have done my best. To be honest, I am so fed up with it at the moment, I am not willing to make any more adjustments to the draft, but I am sure in a couple of days I'll be feeling more positive about it again and less exhausted!
I have next year's work planned out! The first half of the year is going to be very hectic, with preparation for the solo show in April, the accompanying publication and new contacts to be made. I am really looking forward to the challenges and to exhibiting work in new venues. Most of all, I am looking forward to getting back in the studio and making work.
Albums of my work and development can be viewed on my facebook page:
www.facebook.com/SueGoughArtist
