Artweeks!

I'm going to be exhibiting in Artweeks this year -- Oxford's annual open studios event. If you're in the area, please pop in and say hi! I love to chat.

This is my studio, but actually I will be showing my work at the Headington County Library in Bury Knowle Park (because I don't want to invite you all into my bedroom). I'll be there from May 12 - 20, please check the library website for opening hours.

Lots more info and online galleries at www.artweeks.org 

Hope to see you there!

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show-off

I'm excited to announce the opening of my art show this weekend, in the Churchill Hospital's South Street Gallery!

It is a huge long corridor, so I am throwing every canvas I have into it to fill it up... both portraits and abstracts, large and small. I haven't had a show for years, so I am tripping over my nerves and my self-doubt. But! Proceeding nevertheless, because this is how you learn.

Last month my dad & step-mom were here for a visit, and I tasked them with building frames for all my wonky imperial-sized canvases (custom frames would have been ridiculously expensive) (even standard frames are ridiculously expensive). 

They cranked out more than 10 in a few short days, but I still had a few more to finish after they left.

But the efoort was worth it: they turned out so simple and pretty.

There will be brand new pieces, and some from the vaults:

If you're in Oxford or know someone who is, come see it and spread the word!

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portrait gallery

My folks came for a nice long visit over the Easter holiday, and to show them around and to celebrate Jason's birthday, we took a day trip to London -- where I selfishly promoted my own agenda of going to the National Portrait Gallery:

My dad (who is also an artist) and I were especially taken with the studies on display, where the ground of the canvas was exposed, and the garments only sketched in around the beautifully modeled head. It was such a marvelous trompe l'oeil, and made me see how truly bizarre it is to describe a three-dimensional image on a flat surface. 

I could have stayed there all day, marveling at the rich tones and impossible fabrics, and the fact that many of those subjects were gazing out at us from over three hundred years ago. Can you imagine? It's only paint, arranged on canvas, and yet the fact of that singular human is preserved through all that time, its skin still luminous, its presence still eerily close. 

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OK, UK

So, whoa. We live in England now.

We are here and living out of suitcases and riding double-decker buses and discovering parks and museums and funny little alleyways. There is a hustle-and-bustle that is familiar from Kyoto, but a quaintness that suits the scale of the city of Oxford. 

In the City Centre, amidst the colleges of Oxford University, there is that hallowed historical feeling... worn stone steps, churches with thousand-year-old spires, everything uniformly sandstone-colored. Busts of saints and gargoyles peek out from odd corners. The streets are a wonderful jumble: sometimes crooked and cobbled and ancient, and then paved for bus lanes and bike lanes and students on smart phones who cross before they look.

There is an arched walkway between two university buildings called "The Bridge of Sighs." 

We will likely be having high tea with Harry Potter soon enough.

Everything is so quintessentially English, which is ridiculous to say, of course, but the brambly rose gardens growing up mottled cottage walls are straight out of story-books, and the people really do call you "love" in that lilting way, even though you're just in the check-out line at the grocery store.

Bread is good. Cheese is really good. Museums are free. We have bikes. 

So the adventure begins.

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