SPRING IS SPRUNG! NEW WORK, NEW WEBSITE & NEW FACEBOOK PAGE!

© Once upon a Landscape 100 x 100

Well yes, Spring has definitely sprung in this corner of France. After several months of hard work in the studio I have celebrated with a lovely new website put together for me by Richard Dron at Alchemie in Prades, which is so easy for me to work that it has revolutionised my web experience (http://annie-taylor.com). Then today I started a brand new page on facebook - and no, I haven't created the link here yet - although if you look for Annie Taylor Landscapes you should find me, and now, last but not least I'm getting back to my blog.

For the last few months I have been preparing for an exhibition in Dorset, England, that runs from May 26th for two weeks. It's a huge open studio event which takes place every other year. The preparation has been quite intense, but it has also been a lot of fun.  "What no agonising artistic angst?" do I hear you cry - no, just paintings that make me smile!  I have been having a lovely time painting stories - hence the title of the one above - Once upon a landscape.  These imaginary landscapes, peopled (or even 'sheeped') are based on slightly nostalgic memories and are quite a contrast after a heavy year or two of absorbing the mountains around us here and finding different ways to interpret them. 

I owe thanks in part to the wonderful David Hockney, who really got me going again after quite a long period of creative doldrums.  A particularly good interview on English television about his recent landscape exhibition The Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London renewed my interest in the landscapes of my childhood. The exhibition itself, whilst rather overwhelming perhaps in terms of quantity was, for the most part, a celebration of brilliant colour and a permission to interpret that colour in a way that I have not done for some time.