The Sunny Windowsill

Right, there have been complaints about a lack of cats on my facebook profile again… So here is yesterday’s sketch. Sarge sleeping on a sunny windowsill. He makes it look easy, but it is actually hard work. One must be constantly vigilant, ever sleeping with half an eye open so as to know when to turn over. Ideally the time to shift position is once he has been half sketched, and before the sketcher has had time to complete the drawing. Freyja meanwhile, her favourite position usurped, has no other choice than to sleep in the paper-feed of the printer*….

‘Cecily’, against Vobster Green

I have been painting… with real paint! This is the first swimmer painting that hasn’t been digital, but it’s been something I’ve been pondering for a while, whether to plunge into watercolour with the swimmers. So this isn’t a commission, just an experiment of my own. Actually it’s mostly gouache (watercolour with ‘body’, which makes it more opaque, in theory, though the actual pigments I am using here are mostly very translucent), and embellished with gold leaf. The idea of using gold leaf where the water sparkled was irresistible, but I think it did a little over-embellishing at the start…

Christmas at Moorlinch – exhibition & shopping event

Saturday 3rd & Sunday 4th December 2016 Moorlinch, our village of fewer than 200 people, can boast several artists and arts & crafts businesses despite its size. Welcome to our annual pre-Christmas event: part exhibition, part Christmas shopping, part glass-blowing! I shall be opening my studio, hanging pictures on the walls, and have art, calendars, wrapping paper, cards and whatever else I can find, on display and for sale. Meanwhile up the road there will be more too see. The full line-up is: Jenny Graham – stylised landscape paintings, drawings and photo-etchings of the West Country. “showing a new series…

Half Price Print Sale

I have a surplus prints problem! I now have too many in my exhibition stock to put them all out on display, so I’ve put a load of them on Etsy in the ‘Sale’ section of my shop. Mostly there is only one available of each, though there are some duplicates. Click here to see them all. Once they’re gone, these pictures will still be available because i usually print the to order, but they will go back to their full price, so grab these if you want a bargain… There are over 60, all sizes, here is just a…

Ditch Dragons

Continuing in my documentation of a Westcountry Bestiary, I am pleased to be able to introduce you to the Ditch Dragons. They are depicted here in their natural habitat on the edge of a country lane in deepest Somerset. For those unfamiliar with my local landscape, the beautiful county of Somerset is, generally speaking, a wet and soggy place, and as such it requires much drainage. The verges along the edge of quiet country lanes are not the solid ground that foreigners may imagine. Take care! Stepping off the road onto the verdant fringe may take one precipitously close to…

A last-minute riot of Bridesmaids

All other work went on hold from Wednesday to Saturday this week as I did a rather last minute commission for a friend. Not that it had been last-minute from the outset, but I hadn’t been the artist commissioned to do it to begin with, the other one ran away, reasons unknown! This is the blushing bride, surrounded by her hen party all as imaginary bridesmaids, all in fantastically awful pudding bridesmaids dresses (there was a back story here but I think the idea stands on its own without it). I had a photo of each of the girls, and…

“Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed”

I have finished the monster spelling undertaking! If you missed the first stages and explanation, the quote is from William Blake, and the work in progress pictures are here: ‘Biting off more words than I can spell’ ‘Still chewing over the words’ So, I re-did the whole thing, swapping the dip-pen and Indian Ink for a plain old Biro. Not as black, not as ‘proper’ but a far nicer, more sensitive drawing tool to work with… and more disaster-proof, too! Here are the pictures, rather a lot of them: the words are about 35 inches wide, so there is a…

How to Spell with… Pistons.

If you’ve met the Spelling Animals before you will not be surprised to find me occasionally spelling words with slightly inappropriate objects: cats, chickens, octopi and so on. But this may be my most unusual spelling commission to date. Done for my brother as a gift to give to the people from Carbodeon Ltd Oy, a Finnish company specializing in nanomaterials, specifically very, very tiny diamonds. I shan’t go on about the thermal conductivity and functional groups of these things: I spent a day at Birmingham NEC at a trade fair for Advanced Materials and can talk quite convincingly on…

Memento Mori

Not-so-cute cats (mostly). Do not fear, there are no dead cats in this post, but perhaps rat-owners might be advised to look away and to skip this one. Continuing with my little series of cat mezzotint prints, I felt it was important that I didn’t end up with a series entirely comprising nice cute cat pictures. Cats are lovely, but lets have the Compleat Cat. Therefore, I thought at the very least there should be the classic cat-washing-bum pose, and at lease one dead rat. We have chickens and where they live has become so badly undermined with rats we…

Somerset Arts Weeks 2014

Astonishingly mild weather continues and the sun is blazing into the studio, as I crouch on the windowsill to get this shot of all the artwork on display. This is my studio – the gallery-wall side of it anyway, all spruced up and glistening with not an inconsiderable number of square inches of gold leaf, amongst the drawings and paintings. So, if you are going to be nearby in the next fortnight, do come and visit! Details of the exhibition as follows: Dates: 20th September – 5th October 2014 Times: 11am – 6pm every day except Mondays I am very…