A winter view across the R. Alde, Suffolk, towards Snape Maltings. I have been looking at this view this afternoon (23 December) in glorious sunshine, after my picnic lunch on the edge of the marshes shared with 4 curlew, 5 shelduck, a couple of dozen interchangeable godwit/redshank, umpteen dunlin, a Great White egret, an avocet and sundry seagulls – the usual crowd in other words. Strangely, a single goose creaked its way overhead – perhaps its crowd had left it behind.

 

 

 

With this entry, so the automatic counter built into the amazing technology of this web page tells me, I am posting my fiftieth ‘blog’, an event marked by starting, for the first time, with a photograph.

The first ‘blog’ read:

‘Launch

Friday 10 April 2015: sent out first batch of e-mails informing people that the web page exists and is planned to launch on Monday 13 April. Must get this font changed to Arial.’

Well, the font remains the same and that ‘launch’ was a bit of a non-event. Many of the e-mails did not hit their target and I had to relaunch several weeks later. I also struggled greatly with the technology to begin with and certainly doubted whether, with my web designer Bob Foyers, I had made the correct decision to go for a system which I could manage by myself. By and large, however, and with a great deal of hit and miss rather than purely systematic application, it has run reasonably well for the last six months, something enormously gratifying to this keck-handed IT ignoramus; but Bob in the background, and on the other side of a cup of coffee, is essential to the extent that I have had a ‘consultation’ with him this morning on matters vital which I am about to implement (there will be more pictures in ‘Insight’ if I have learned properly, as the photograph above indicates).

So that’s just over eight months to reach 50 ‘posts’ which is about 6 a month or 1-2 per week on average. This is not very interesting or meaningful, particularly as in practice I’ve tended to write in batches and then leave the web for some weeks at a time.

Possibly slightly more interesting, so another piece of the machinery tells me, is that in the same eight months I have exhibited 31 paintings split almost exactly equally between 16 ‘figurative’ and 15 ‘abstract’. That is, quite un-selfconsciously I would stress, fairly close to the average of one new painting per week, or 32 in eight months, indicated in my Preface last April as the sort of turnover I had in mind before I knew how things were going to work out.

Recognising how well The Gallery here as it stands at the moment represents my work, I have presented it to The Halesworth Gallery as a submission for consideration of my ‘oeuvre’ in one of its exhibitions in 2016.