The painting with the silver bud vase is now finished and uploaded to my website and the painting I've almost finished is this one, called Summer Harvest: I'm not sure about the background colour so I'm still working on it.

I haven't been painting much recently as I've been busy preparing for the our local art society's Summer Exhibition which  is currently taking place at the magnificent St Laurence's Church in Ludlow for the first time. The screens holding our paintings are in the chancel which houses the famous misericords and the many people that come to see these are also having to navigate around our artwork. Next spring's exhibition will be in a different place within the church; controversially, more pews are being removed to provide a better location for our screens. These are some of photos of the work I've entered in situ:

This week I visited the Tate Gallery in Liverpool and saw the Jackson Pollock exhibition: Blind Spots. Pollock was an American abstract artist who found a new way to express the world around him and eventually became known for his complete redefinition of modernist painting. He dripped and threw paint from above onto his canvas which was lying flat on the ground using colour and then later in his career, black and white. I particularly liked the painting entitled: Summertime number. 9A painted in 1948 which, though abstract, seemed to have dancing figures worked across the large canvas. The writer of the programme notes says that he "produc(ed) a tense balance between abstraction and figuration that blurs the lines between conscious and unconscious motivations." All very different from my own way of representational painting.