Holiday Plein Air

Arrived back from a week in Javea, Spain on Saturday, having had a brilliant time with my Dad, two sons and their girlfriends (hubby too!!), have eaten and drunk to our hearts content and now coming back to reality of eating healthily and cutting out all the overindulgence. The weather has been beautiful and we had returned to a villa which we hired last year called "Casa Flores"..... really lovely, sleeps 8, well equipped, private, in a very smart well appointed development just outside Javea.

I had taken my paints with the intention of painting plein air and am happy to say I actually managed a few.

This is taken from the grounds of the villa looking onto the veranda which was nicely shaded and where we ate all our meals...... we had a selection of food as well as eating out, paella, tapas, chicken stuffed with chorizo... both my sons (and girlfriends) are fantastic cooks and both also seem to really enjoy so we are not stupid when inviting them to join us, we can be assured of top class food!!!

This was at the side of the veranda and I have to admit I decided not to paint the 2 easy chairs and sofa which are here as I didn't fancy all that drawing so the space looks a bit bare now!!! But this too is a lovely shaded, comfortable area where you can escape the strong midday sun though the weather while we were there was perfect and non of us needed to sit here.

The villa is surrounded by bougainvillea so couldn't leave without a quick sketch of the flower heads.....

All these sketches have been done really small, postcard size and I have learned quite a lot from doing them, not least of which is drawing small, I tend to draw big and this is really good practice for drawing in proportion with perspective, things in the distance always end up too large in my paintings so this has been a really good earning experience for me and I will certainly do more in the future.

The idea to go small is down to Maggie Latham who has a blog and has also started a  facebook group  devoted to exploring the possibilities when working in this way... to look at using new techniques and possibly try different media (hmm not sure I will be dragged away from my watercolours but we'll see!!!) and I can see the merits of working small... it is easy to experiment on a small piece and not as unnerving seeing a tiny piece of paper as looking at a piece of full imperial!!!

Am now working very hard trying to finish off all my pieces for the Exhibition from the 25th to 29th September,  am paying them a visit tomorrow so will be able to see from this weeks' artists how many paintings I'm going to need to fill the space.... should have about 25 framed and a few more mounted so fingers crossed that will be enough!!!

My house is in a state of disarray with paintings, frames, mounts, cellophane, bubble wrap all over the place

I have now spread from my art room to the spare bedroom, to the sitting room and finally to the dining room..... the word tidy doesn't seem to be in my vocabulary but hopefully will all be straight and back to normal after I deliver them at the weekend and am hoping to not be bringing them all back again!!!  My husband has taken to hanging them all in our house but as I now have another 12 we will be running out of walls!!!

If you are in the area, do try and visit the exhibition, it is running for 8 weeks, Tuesday to Saturday, with a change over of artists every Tuesday.  I think there will be a really interesting mix of work, judging from the synopses of the artists, covering a wide variety of media and subjects.