Rosemarie O'Leary
Fine Art
Well life has thrown another curve ball. Not only am I still on hold, almost a year later, like tens of thousands of other souls waiting for routine surgery that will make my life a little easier, but over Christmas I woke up to severe double vision. It certainly creates a challenge when you love painting.
Picking up a brush after a much needed break feels good. Sometimes life gets in the way of things. Health problems, other life pressures and not to mention a global pandemic of Covid that had quickly reached our local area. Everything just shut down.
Normally painting is a zen like process for me, but the worries of life infiltrated that process and I struggled to concentrate. So, I decided to take a break from creating new work in the studio and instead, focussed on our home and garden throughout the summer and autumn, all the while letting my shop tick over. For me it was the right thing to do.
Making air dried clay hearts is a wonderful creative pastime. Airdrying clay is widely available from craft and art stores. I’m experimenting at the moment with different brands, but primarily they all work out the same. Here is a step by step of how I make my art decoration hearts.
Bringing in the new year of 2020 was a welcome hope for the future, not least because the entire Christmas period was a comatose blur under the influence of the dreaded flu bug!
All new years begin with hopes and dreams, and after the last year of sad loss and so many hospital visits that I’ve lost count, the hope of the sun shining on our lives is even greater.
While I’m reluctant to start booking at fairs again, I decided I would attend and support this one in my home village for two reasons:
1. It is the first to establish local small businesses, and support means it has a better chance of being successful all round in the future, and
2. It is local, and a great way to get to know more local people and vice versa, they get to know me and what I do.
As it has been quite a few years since I took part in a market, there was quite a bit of preparation involved in getting ready, from making sure I had plenty of business cards to hand out, to having a good selection of smaller works for display. My good sturdy print rack came in handy for flicking through art prints because the table was not huge, but I think I managed to display everything well enough which included:-
The painting I decided to submit, “The Window” just seemed to jump out to be put forward because of the difficult times we have had this year, losing my lovely Mum In Law. I painted this a few years back based on the internal architecture of Pershore Abbey near my parents’ home. I loved the arches and the way the light was falling between the pillars and coming through the window, so accentuated them to portray my own sense of what spirituality is, and the trust that through a “window” we carry on into a next life.
I’m really enjoying the physical aspect of making my own clay hearts. It gives me the freedom to choose my own shapes and sizes, and I can say that I’ve made them literally from start to finish. I’m using air dry clay and it has been a challenge to roll the clay smooth enough to make a good painting surface for detail work. I also wanted the hearts to be delicate and thin rather than thick and chunky, which posed a challenge to stop them curling at the edges while they were drying, so they were turned over regularly and kept from drying too quickly. When they are dry, even though they are thin, they are surprisingly tough.