new start

My sister and I have spent the last month creating this sparkly new website and I am over the moon with the result. It feels like a spring clean, and the start of a new chapter. I hope to be a bit more proactive with my blog, have more work for sale on the website, and generally make it a more dynamic experience. After all, the internet is the way forward and invaluable for us artists as a way of getting our work out into the world.

All this looking forward has, paradoxically, made me reflect on the last 25 years. When I left college the internet was still young and only for computer geeks! There was no emailing galleries with a link to your website; you had to physically go to the gallery with your actual work. My idea of a portfolio was a small sketchbook full of very badly taken photos, stuck in with sellotape. It makes me cringe now, but I took this scruffy book to my local gallery in Truro and presented it to the owner with the audacious question: would she like to sell my paintings? Unbelievably, she saw beyond the wobbly images and yellowing sellotape to the potential and agreed to hang my work. I went on to have the first of many solo shows with that gallery and so my career as a painter began.

Over the years the internet crept into my life and now of course I use it all the time, but it is only now that I really appreciate what an essential tool it is for the solitary artist, slogging away in their studio. It feels like I am connected to literally the whole world. I love the idea that anyone could be looking at my site at any time. Now all I have to do is make sure my paintings are worthy of that attention.