Excellent news!

Galley hill allotments in the snow

Sails up in harbour, Paimpol

Fresh fried fish, Essaouira

Enormous good news to share with you today! The nervous wait of the year is over and I am absolutely over the moon to have had these three paintings all selected for the Royal Institute of Oil painters exhibition! I was thinking when I sent my six down to London that the results would feel like an appraisal of my year's work, rightly or wrongly. Maybe that sounds a bit dramatic to you and probably isn't the best thought to carry when entering a selected exhibition but I do take this society very seriously. It's been a sort of spiritual home to me since 1997 when the ROI first awarded me a 'Young artists award'. 

Anyway, the results do feel like a sign that I am travelling in the right direction! I'm especially pleased that two of the selected paintings and the big one that was chosen for the Royal Society of Marine Artists exhibition are studio works. This gives me great courage to pursue my current path of taking my favourite plein air themes into the studio for further development. 

The 'Fresh fried fish' one was the first studio produced painting that I have ever been pleased with! It marked a turning point!

The 'Sails up' one is my most recent completed studio painting, as you know it was finished just a few weeks ago.

The allotments painting in the snow was completed entirely in one session en plein air. I was thrilled with it at the time, back in January, and I've saved it all year with this exhibition in mind. I'm thrilled and proud now!

The exhibition will take place at the Mall Galleries London from 11th to the 21st December.

Getting out there and finding inspiration!

And here's another thing... for a trial period I'm adding easy 'buy it now' buttons to some of my current paintings in my Daily Paintworks gallery. I get lots of emails from people asking 'how much is...?' and I know there are lots of others who don't like to ask! So here's the thing, now you can take a peek at the price and availability of a painting without asking me directly. Easy! And there's a currency converter button there so UK friends please don't be panicking if you see the price in dollars... 

At the moment I'm trying this with about half a dozen paintings just to test the water, including these two...

Click here to view!

Click here to view!