One of a Kind Pieces for One of a Kind people
This week, I created a YouTube video to show buyers how I create the beautiful diffusers for my lampshades.
Though Edison-style lightbulbs are available, they don’t always suit every interior style scheme, especially if you’re going for a more cosy, less industrial look.
Watch how easy it is to assemble a diffuser for your lamp shades. I’m considering having these as kits in my shop as an alternative way to hang and present my artwork.
My work as a corporate trainer/ instructor and coach this week took me for an onsite to our client in their new home in an amazing building. The Arbor Building is in Blackfriars Road in London, UK and it boasts that it is carbon neutral. There are neighbouring buildings and I’m told it is a fossil free development called Bankside Yards which is a major architectural, construction and interiors project feat. I was especially impressed at how beautifully the interiors echoed the sustainability ethos too. See the photos I took below
My return to and finding new uses for the small drum lampshades have sparked fresh creativity and renewed interest.
Currently the empire and coolie (more correctly conical) style of lampshade is all the rage. This created my dilemma, as fewer people were buying the drum shades, especially in the small sizes that I make. And I had made a lot to experiment and sharpen my practice of adding more decorative elements to them like the metal upholstery studs as I’ve always loved that classic look.
But, this week I set on a spree to rediscover what the styling options were for the plethora of small 15cm drum lampshades that I have in store (not all are in the online shop).
Continue reading “The Drums are not Beaten”I’m an obvious urbanite and was nervous about travelling to England’s South West Countryside for work, this week. I had to visit Somerset in particular Chard for my 9 to 5. But my journey was helped because I stayed at a lovely little local guesthouse. And while the Chard guesthouse did not exhibit all the slick, minimalist, post modern or contemporary industrial style I have been accustomed to seeing on my usual business travels, this place really did emit some helpful old world charm
I live in West London. These are photos of the wintery views this week. I was mesmerised by the ghostly set of buildings arising from the Olympia vicinity. I was transfixed on the building cluster in the distance that seemed to appear and sometime not appear, as if a mirage.
I’ve been admiring the other artists on Instagram who also integrate their painting or mark making onto home decor items.
I had a go and added some of my usual extra embellishments
Continue reading “Elvish: Hand Painted Lampshades”I had a few days of annual leave from my 9 to 5 this week. With this time I managed to make a few skins in preparation for bigger paintings and to help finish the smaller pieces.
I managed to meet up with old friends for lunches and suppers. It was at these events where I later became struck at how much my social world influences or at least threatens to shape what I do with my art.
They say express your artist statement helps your audience understand the significance of your artwork.
Continue reading “My Artist Statement”
I got a chance to do some blue sky thinking 🤔 this week on a train ride from Birmingham.
The journey gave me an opportunity to plan some new artwork based on these pictures I took. I was also able to make connections to the paint skins I was creating.
Continue reading “Blue Sky Thinking to Create New Skins”I’ve been enhancing my photography. The aim is to tell a story in small vignettes. I’ve been learning from iconic professional photographers who specialise in products, lifestyle and jewelry photographs. I’ve learned my photography from various courses online and in classroom settings in London.
Continue reading “Clarifying three stories of the bookish hedonistic professional”Recently I’ve been experimenting with colour intensity and they’re beginning to convey my sense about how we work and contemporary working environments.
Continue reading “Brushes with colour therapy”Visiting old friends in the English Country side. I managed to capture rare Images of flowers starting to bloom at the arboretum.
So it’s a short post this week, the pictures of flowers I might use in a photo collage project later.
We have a new Ikea (well, it’s one year old) in Hammersmith, and I popped in there to get my lamp base, as it is those that I use in my photo shoots for my lampshades.
However, I found the new shapes and colours on display inspired me. It was mostly monochrome (black and white on display there). I grew curious about how they managed only to charge £8.00 for a floor lamp. I then began to look more closely at how these were made and noticed how they used plastic clips to attach the ring to the fabric.
I wondered why this form of making lampshades might exist and then realised it might enable the scaling up of the production.
Normally, the fiddly bit in lampshades is tucking the fabric into the metal frame. Some artisans get over this fiddly bit using a lampshade binder; see Lush Designs in the video below.
Seeing this and other lampshade manufacturing videos made me think of what is possible beyond my art being a hobby and into a full-blown business in the future.
However, a big part of me wishes to keep my hand in the work and mix a combination of digital technology and manufacturing equipment to still allow my items to emit a personality while offering a personal and even bespoke buying service to potential customers.
Although I didn’t make much this week, I made a lot of progress with decisions on what equipment to invest in to increase my making while developing my unique style to more customers.
I’m creating a collection of small finely painted works that contain expressions of the alphabet.
Here are the first 10. Further blogs will have letters J through to Z.
These delightful small oblong paintings with initials might make lovely gifts for those wanting monograms in art. Or these are great for people WFH and they want their initials for their surname displayed on their bookshelf.
It was sad that Queen Elizabeth II died on Thursday, last week. I didn’t realise. I was at a work party. Then, on my way home, I saw all the adverts on the bus shelter portray TFL’s tribute/ perhaps public announcement. This is because all digital posters were saying the same thing. They all said Queen Elizabeth II 1926 to 2022 on a grey background. It was not too unlike the image below. That was my first indication that something had changed. I was very surprised.
Today I have been watching her coffin leave Balmoral and travel to Edinburgh. The road from Balmoral to the East is a road I had also travelled when I lived in Aberdeen as an MSc student at the University of Aberdeen. When the BBC TV presenters were calling out the towns like Banchory and Stonehaven as well as Donatoar Castle while the beautiful helicopter camera view of the journey televised its hearse tracking, it brought back my good memories of the Scottish countryside. It also felt quite moving.
Today it felt fitting to create some etchings and quick paint sketchings and draft paintings in royal purple. These are unfinished works. Below are images using purple. I sometimes shy away from purple, but since Queen Elizabeth II’s death, I’ve seen the Empire State Building shine her image amidst purple lights. Purple is currently a big theme.
Queen Elizabeth’s coffin is due to arrive in London via Northolt Airport (not far from where I live). I remember going to Northolt airport 25 years ago to watch Diana’s coffin arrive from Paris, and I (with some friends) watched it travel down the tunnel for the A40. In fact, I’m inclined to go to the A40 on Tuesday to pay my respects to Queen Elizabeth as the hearse makes its way into central London. If I get any pictures, I will post them here. The ritual of watching dignitaries and their coffins travel by road via TV reminds me of when I watched Nelson’s Mandella televised coffin travelling to its burial site in 2013. It is amazing what TV can allow you to do nowadays.
I’m creating painted potions. They look good, feel good (because of the textures) and they’re full of ingredients that do you good.
In psychology, it is vital to integrate the self. I feel that the painted potions I create to uplift home office scenes express all of my talents and everything I am good at and love to do.
Some might say it is brut art because I didn’t go to art school (for fine art) and sometimes I use my hands. But I taught in a world-class art school for about 10 years, and I wonder whether those years count. I probably absorbed the artistic rules and principles while chatting to colleagues about student work and the issues in the industry.
In the pictures are painted potions in the process of making. They take several days and weeks to make as I spend hours deciding how to build up the layers, aromas and textures for the desired effect. Close up. I like to use expensive fabric in my painted potions. Some of it is a bit of deconstruction another bit of it is about what they add aesthetically.
The painted potions I have been creating use helpful herbs like lavender, lemon verbena, rose and myrrh. They smell great. The painted potions also give a nod to crystal therapy as I’ve been using citrine, turquoise and other gemstones with their wonderful energy, so far. I have collected lots over the years.
One day I shall tell you about my early years as a therapist who used more fluid an unction, lotions and potions to uplift the spirits of stressed-out clients in spas salons around the world. But for now, let’s admire the notion of painted potions.
Those are the first two ways my experience is integrated within my panted potions.
Next time I shall tell you about the work I’ve been doing around the workplace wellbeing for 10 years and how that has meaning for these painted potions too.
I wanted to do justice to this standard lamp as its trimming update was long overdue.
It’s one of the pieces that I realise now was over designed. And recently I’d
been wanting to strip down the details always remembering the less is more rule. I continued to be Inspired by smart office dress and my mood board contained images from Pinterest.
Then the finished piece is is what I’m much happier with. Just need to get a new lamp stand. Thinking dark burnt oak or ebony wood.
Following on from the last success with multimedia and because I hadn’t much opportunity to do any brush work recently I have modified one of my paintings using my phablet as it is my new…. toy.
Does it look bashful to you? The fantasy flower in this painting appears to be slightly embarrassed.
I wonder why.
Perhaps it is because I used the big bold blusher brush to get all the emotion out to create those swirls.
There is no shame here. Be bold with your crimson connection. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with combining magentaish pink with understated and sultry coral.
Be proud we say!
Here is what the detail of it looks framed.
Shine on with your cool bold emblushered self.
So this is the same canvas that i showed you in my previous post. But I just painted over it. Feeling better about how this one looks.
Home Office Charm 
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