Good news, bad news. (Aside from the ongoing global bad news.)

The good news is that the sun has mostly been shining and it has been lovely to see Central Park burst into life with the cherry trees and magnolias showing off their beautiful flowers, and the allotments are showing signs of life. This past month we’ve been to Bristol, to see the truly excellent Paula Rego exhibition at the Arnolfini gallery, what an amazing technical ability Rego has, well worth a visit, and then we popped in to one of our favourite old haunts, Zero Degrees for a mango beer in the sunshine. Now that we live in the centre of the city, we’ve got rid of the car in an effort to be green and to live within our budget, so that’s been passed onto son No.3. This means we now go everywhere by public transport and what an interesting experience that can be. On the way home from Bristol we - and the train - got caught in a wave at Teignmouth.

Still exploring our new surroundings, we walked to Firestone Bay and watched the boats in the Sound. Some old friends came to stay and took us to Cawsand and Kingsand via the Torpoint ferry; the Rame peninsula and Rame Head in particular is unspoilt and beautiful with staggering views down the coastline towards the Lizard. It was a top day out especially when we ended up in Roam, our very local independent craft brewery for a swift 2/3 before supper.

The bad news is that my Instagram has been hacked and taken over which was entirely my fault for clicking on a link from a friend (aka the hacker, as it turned out) and within 2 minutes my account had been completely taken over and despite my best efforts to get Instagram to help me to get it back under my control, it has gone. I can’t decide whether to get a new account or not; in the meantime I shall use this Blog.

In the studio, I’m working my way through an online course run by St Ives School of Painting with Liz Hough as the tutor; it’s a follow up online course to one she ran last year and we’re learning strategies to help us move our work towards the abstract. (This movement towards online courses must surely be one of the benefits of the pandemic, because it means anyone can attend without having the additional cost of travelling to and staying in St Ives, lovely though St.Ives is?) Anyway, this month we’ve been turning our black and white drawings into monoprints then into 3D models, which we then draw and make collages from. I have done a ton of drawings, monoprints and sketches, whilst my studio looks like a Blue Peter set after the kids have gone home. All of the processes Liz has shown us have been a lot of fun and I will definitely be using them in my practice going forward.