Spirit Justice tour in a SHOP!

It has been such fun to have the Spirit Justice tour in Aberdeen. The congregation from the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church negotiated with the Trinity Centre Aberdeen and secured a corner unit to use for a month. It was a fabulous choice of disused shop with the whole space looking like a gallery in no time. A fabulous opportunity for the churches to show their joint work and mission, almost 200 people stopped by long enough to be counted. The visitors book shows that people came from all over Scotland and beyond. We had a wonderful opening, including attendees from the charity Grampians Racial Equality Council, who will be the recipients of the 40% raised from the sale of prints. The church members said that it was an excellent project to help them connect with their community and they were pleased to do it.

Eons ago, when I was a student in training for the ministry, I was artist in residence for the Milton Keynes Christian Council. We organised an exhibition called Images of God (I might have changed the name in later years), but it was a gathering of almost 700 pieces artwork from all over the new city with two and three dimensional artwork showing people’s ideas of God and of connecting with the Divine. The City Council sponsored it with display stands, David Bellamy opened it, and it was an awesome statement about a new city’s welcome of its people. It’s been a long time from that to this one-artist show and I confess that my heart is so in what just happened in Aberdeen. The comments from visitors showed how much the art spoke to them. The connections made by the churches were invaluable.

AND...breathe

In case you hadn’t spotted, we’ve doing a good deal of travelling. Over a thousand, closer to two thousand some months, of miles each calendar month since September. Also in case you hadn’t been reading my newsletter, most of those miles have been in a little or a deluge of rain. Today the sun is shining and its heaven. We’ve actually been in our own bed since July 9th. Amazing. We knew that running two parallel exhibitions would be time consuming, but we had no idea how much. This afternoon, just before this blog, I managed to finish a whole set of images for some illustrations I’m still in the middle of the commissioned work to do.

I keep reading that rest is important. Intellectually, I know it is true. Spiritually, I know it is true. Physically, my body has been managing my history by being busy. If I’m busy, then I’m not remembering things I don’t want to ever think about again. If I’m busy, I keep myself out of someone’s line of fire. If I’m busy, I keep myself proving that I’m worth it. Well, thanks to some lovely very hard work of Lent this year 2024 after the touring began, I let myself get as enormously angry as I wanted by doing a structured Lament every week day of Lent. I knew that I needed to rest regularly from that, so I let the weekends of Lent offer that rest. Result? I learned to rest. I intellectually, spiritually and physically, put my history to bed. Its power is gone. I can breathe.

So, increasingly since Lent, I’ve been resting, faffing, doing some adminstration and having wonderful catch-ups with friends and family. We have turned journeys to and from exhibitions into mini holidays for ourselves, and adding dinner with people we love, stopping to see unexpected family and even taking in the United Reformed Church General Assembly just for a visit. Thanks to the URC’s generosity, we stopped for Sunday lunch and renewed friendship and colleagueship all over the place.

I offer you rest, dear readers. I can testify to its power and its peace.

Residencies

I thought I’d take a moment, in the midst of two UK wide exhibition tours, to tell you about my residency work. Despite all the painting, despite all the digital illustration, by far my most loved art creation for me is in the stress and joy of the moment of an artist residency. That’s where I get asked to be on site or digitally in the moment, listen to conversations and decisions unfold, and capture what they look like to me. Fundamentally, I illustrate the real time process of coming to a mind about something.

Each residency is a story of progression - my commission, my arrival on site (or online), my preparation to do the work, the images as they developed with a story for each progression point, and the final piece.  Sometimes there are images which go with each process moment and sometimes there aren't, but there is a flow from the commission to completion, all in more or less the same order.

Over the next months, my amazing web wizard will be designing a sets of pages which capture those process moments, then unfold each artwork or set of artworks and their narratives. I’m excited that they will all be online. It’s a wonderful moment for me! Migration Journey was from a residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f76e91b917a8a15a9d7b801/1706782422211-NW476L0VB718QNEZSB9G/Migration-journey.jpg?format=500w as was Peeps Table Talk https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f76e91b917a8a15a9d7b801/1706782416863-Y9B9OWXHER5KAS9P99NG/SofS-Peeps-table-talk.jpg?format=300w More will come!

‘Profoundly moving’ Open To All exhibition tour - Three more venues to go!

The Open to All tour continues with its 13 intriguing and affirming canvases, exploring the equality and inclusivity of God’s love.

We are presently enjoying the hospitality of Newport Cathedral, tucked into a town full of history of justice. Without question, the first objective of our tour, to open dialogue, is continually being achieved. We knew, half way through, that the churches and cathedrals where we’ve been invited have already developed an inclusive heart.

Coventry Cathedral’s Dean told us that the exhibition helped the cathedral illustrate what it had been saying. City URC in Cardiff has had an inclusive meeting like OTN since 2011, yet the exhibition helped them speak this more plainly. People brought people to see the images to speak about the content. Among many positive notes in the visitors book were,

‘Thanks for a very inspiring exhibition, hope it will stimulate me to find new ways of expressing my evolving experience of the mystery; I found this exhibition profoundly moving, the layers, the depths, the connections; Immensely moving and hopeful.’

 An already established inclusive heart was made quite clear to us in Newport where one of the speakers was OTN patron the Right Revd Cherry Vann, Bishop of Monmouth, openly gay and in a civil partnership. She led the Pentecost communion service and was deeply welcoming of the exhibition’s message of God’s inclusive love.  Revd Canon Andrew Lightbown from Newport Cathedral also spoke at the launch of the city’s Chartist history and the active work even now to let all voices be heard.  The exhibition was welcomed with open arms by a very full congregation who walked away from the launch having bought enough prints to contribute £158 to OTN.

Our second objective, to help people engage with God more deeply for themselves continues to be met well. In one personal conversation, a woman told me that her experience of the painting Am I Free, illustrated absolutely her experience of coming to faith.  She bought a print to be able to share that story with others.  We continue to be thrilled as we see again and again how the conversations around the paintings help people talk about their own personal faith.

The exhibition’s third objective, to help people gain personal confidence, seems to be being met though people don’t talk so much about it to us or write it in the visitors book. We see it as we watch people have faith conversations and we know that it must be true because church members are inviting non-church members to visit the exhibitions.  It is reported to us that there are a good number of visitors to each venue and this perhaps underlies those more confident engagements.

We encourage you to visit London (23rd June-19th July), or one of the extra tour venues just added: Winchester (23rd July-10th August), and Chelmsford (12th-23rd August). It’s not long now!

The Dandelion community Celebrates the Spirit Justice tour

When I talk about my artwork and its role as illustration or painitngs on prints on walls, I always talk about its ability to start conversations. This is the point of it being on exhibition or being sold. When I began as an artist, I had no idea that this would be any individual piece’s purpose or my overall purpose as an artist. I just created art. As my art started to blend with my theology after my ordination, I noticed that the artwork, in whatever form, became a kind of proclamation about justice. This was as unexpected for me as it may be for you.

The Spirit Justice tour is on its second leg, now at The Dandelion Community in Wythenshawe, south Manchester. This is what the Revd Kate Gray, minister of the community, told me about their first Sunday with the paintings:

“We had a whole service about it yesterday with 50% of the congregation with adults who don't read or write and the conversations were amazing - with reflection on experiences like childlessness and fathering, about education in schools, about the slave trade and human trafficking, about people in small boats seeking safety. They shared about childhood experiences of abuse, of religious control and of what kind of God, what kind of church and what kind of people we are in relation to all of these. People loved that they didn't have to go to an art gallery to see your art and that the materials and professional presentation of your work was very important for them too in receiving it. Wow. Thankyou.”

Kate kindly took a few videos of me talking about the work. Here’s the one on Padonna:

https://youtu.be/PP6sPFesXM8

If you want to see others, they’re on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc1k_-8erzjYvKmtPS6wldg

Appreciating Health and Social Care

Appreciating Health and Social Care is the name of the new book in which I have illustrated the concepts and processes of Appreciative Inquiry for the health and social care sectors in the UK. I am, of course, delighted to have learned that it is the only book in the world addressing a cultural change in the health sector through a positive strength based approach. It has potential to change everything. Truly. I share this post from my commissioner, Appreciating People, with whom I’ve worked before. They are your source of the book and more information: https://appreciatingpeople.co.uk/

I have an excellent photographer :-)

It only occurred to me today in a conversation with someone else, that I rarely mention, and never I thank in writing, that I have an excellent photographer. This is critical. Every time I talk about a Gallery Print or a Giclee or an embellished Giclee on cavas, I’m talking about a photograph of my painting which is then transferred to digital print. There would be no print sales otherwise. Only one painting has been proffessionally scanned and I’d never do that again (!).

An excellent photographer is a hard thing to find. The first criteria is that they understand the point of the photograph, not only what the image should be in terms of focus, light and colour, but what the overall idea is supposed to be. They get the context and higher purpose. But they are also skilled at seeing the fine detail. My photographer is an absolute gift and he also happens to be my husband. I had no idea, even when we were first married, that this is the skill he would bring to a real working parnership.

When we work on a photoshoot, we use a room with excellent surrounding light, not direct light. We used to use my studio, north facing with a huge window and blinds. We now use our front room with a light mushroom coloured wall, a large south facing window and lights we can position as needed. Pete chooses all the camera settings for things I didn’t even know existed. I then plug the cameral into my Microsoft Surface Studio computer with a screen resolution of 4500 x 3000 and open the image, usually with the painting next to me. Seldom, but possible, is that I’ll open the photograph in Camera Raw and make adjustments. The fun thing is that if the image isn’t quite square becasue we may not have the distance of camera to size of painting which we need, I can straighten it when I move on to Adobe Photoshop.

When I write ‘We’, I truly mean we. My artwork gets out there because of Pete. Quite a team.