Lavender Oil at the ready

The Summer Art Party is tomorrow! Eek!
The feedback from John Jones has been fantastic already with clients really engaging with the works. Tomorrow there will be about 600 people heading through the doors. I feel faint.
I actually really like talking about the works, the discussions are fascinating. Also if you go to the RCA you soon stop feeling self conscious about it as you are always explaining and exploring your works to rooms full of people. It doesn’t stop the nerves though and tomorrow will be super –charged. My biggest fear is being mediocre. I don’t mind if people don’t like it….well I do if I am really honest but that is not realistic.

In the interim I have been distracting myself with those research trips I mentioned. Assembling ideas and planning out pieces. I am going paint 3 pieces inspired by Margate. A memento-mori of a town. One of the pieces is going to be interspliced with social housing from Poplar as problem families used to be shipped out of London to Margate.
I remember Margate was so vibrant when we went there as children, now row upon row of boarded up shops are like skeletons on the marine parade. The Turner contemporary exhibition in a former M&S was fantastic though. A really great show and indicative of the revival which may have a chance to occur there.

I have also been to Brighton to discuss my next exhibition, ‘Floorplan’ at the Brighton Phoenix Gallery in September, a very good public gallery. I am organising a workshop with a local community group, plus I and the other artists shall be involved in an artists talk discussing the psychology of buildings which I am already looking forward to.

I have also been planning and interviewed for drawing workshops at the Tower of London and found out today I got the job!

As for painting, I am now back to the actuality of it. I am as always slightly daunted by what has I have made before. Back into the cycle of questioning, exploring, doubting and persevering.

Tomorrow if you are coming to the Summer Art Party you will be able to find me, see johnjones.co.uk for more details. I shall be the lady doused in Lavender oil and hopefully not breathing into a bag. Come say hello

choice blog on A-N

This month Matt Roberts from Matt Roberts Arts and Salon08 and 09 selected my blog on artist's talking, A-N.

Pretty exciting !

http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/article/536689
Matt Roberts on Rosalind Davis
A relative novice to the Blogosphere Rosalind Davis' Blog illustrates an artist tentatively using the medium as a tool for self-critique, laying out her feelings about her work as it develops. Beyond the life of this project her blog exists as a living portfolio, as we, the reader are offered a window into the ideas that lay behind each piece as she juggles the pressures of life, work, and artistic ambition.

Rosalind's posts become more frequent as the process becomes more natural to her, and we gain an insight into how her work has been shaped by the community around her, as well as learning of her 'aristocratic' legacy, and adept climbing skills. Overall we see a picture of a talented and committed artist, making difficult practice-based and career decisions, whilst trying to remain financially stable, and a functioning person.

A narrative I'm sure we can all empathise with.

Projection Exhibition Information

I am delighted to invite you to:
Projection Rosalind Davis

Exhibition from 6th July - 21st August
Open to the public Monday – Friday from 9am – 6pm

We are delighted to announce Rosalind Davis as our next artist to exhibit in Projection, a space for solo shows which aims to increase the exposure of mainly unseen artists as an aspect of their professional development.

Rosalind Davis is a mixed media painter and graduate from the RCA, creating melancholy dystopian landscapes that explore human experience and identity.

Davis fuses painting, collage and embroidery onto printed floral fabrics, selected for their historical, cultural and symbolic representations. This complex relation between mediums is integral to the piece emphasising the fragility of the spaces depicted and the disconcerting juxtaposition between aesthetics and meaning.

http://www.johnjones.co.uk/
4 Morris Place, N4 3JG
020 7281 5439

Interim

I have not left yet! No no, here a little longer......I have been working away at one last painting in the last week before the show opens. There were also a book of drawings to organise and now.....The paintings have been hung and there is the undeniable fear and exhiliration of the Exhibition!
you may be pleased to hear, I am restored to good health, have broken only a few more glasses and am considering tackling my tax return (joy)

I am also seeking new inspiration and have been cycling around poplar and silvertown, very bleak in places. I saw 5 burnt out pubs in a mile! I am also off to Gravesend and Margate over the next week. Exciting! I used to spend weekends at Dreamland in Margate with my dad and I am interested to see how it has changed, soak up the atmosphere. Seaside towns are intriguing, a mix of kitsch and seediness.

Also with the big art party at John Jones to gear up to on the 31st July I am doing all that I can to promote the show and am constantly thrilled by the great help of John Jones crew in all of this and the marvellous marketing ladies ! Self promotion can be a terrible bane but a necessary evil. In some ways it can be quite a joy if people respond to you,an exhibition is a great reason to get in touch with peole and tell them what you are working on. At other times it feels like you must as well be chucking a piece of paper out of the window for all the good it is doing you....! I shall let you know how it all goes.....

Finishing Touches

The delivery van from John Jones is coming tomorrow and I am putting the last few details into the paintings.
I feel I have learnt a lot in these 2 months about my painting. I have found a new confidence, a freedom....the paintings have gotten less earnest. Less concerned with realistic representation and I am enjoying it all immensely. I am still unsure of my big well hall road piece and it may not be right still, but those decisions can come next week during installation and discussion of the pieces I shall show.
I have been using square scarves in these new pieces which allow for a new composition to occur within the works and to consider the composition in different ways and I shall continue to work on these scarves in the future.
Physically and mentally I am exhausted. I have felt under the weather on and off for the last month really. My head and eyes ache and my throat is sore. I think I will be in bed on Wednesday recuperating.... Painting is a very physical effort and you are also pouring yourself into it mentally. Challenging your opinions on it, reviewing the pieces, considering when to stop the paint and where to start again.
Emotionally though I allow myself to feel a bir proud of the progress I have made and where I have been less successful in them there are lessons to be learnt.
I am excited and eager to get onto the next one. To discover more. To keep goingThe delivery van from John Jones is coming tomorrow and I am putting the last few details into the paintings.
I feel I have learnt a lot in these 2 months about my painting. I have found a new confidence, a freedom....the paintings have gotten less earnest. Less concerned with realistic representation and I am enjoying it all immensely. I am still unsure of my big well hall road piece and it may not be right still, but those decisions can come next week during installation and discussion of the pieces I shall show.
I have been using square scarves in these new pieces which allow for a new composition to occur within the works and to consider the composition in different ways and I shall continue to work on these scarves in the future. The interference between the floral patterns is interesting.

The florals produce a dichotomy with the rural and idyllic versus the tensions of the urban cityscape.

Physically and mentally I am exhausted. I have felt under the weather on and off for the last month really. My head and eyes ache and my throat is sore. I think I will be in bed on Wednesday recuperating.... Painting is a very physical effort and you are also pouring yourself into it mentally. Challenging your opinions on it, reviewing the pieces, considering when to stop the paint and where to start again.
Emotionally though I allow myself to feel a bit proud of the progress I have made and where I have been less successful in them there are lessons to be learnt.
I am excited and eager to get onto the next one. To discover more. To keep going

Buildings and Identity

Buildings have powerful connotations. Notions of identity are strongly linked with building; the places where we are bound.
They are refuges, sanctuary, prisons, cells, palaces. They can be cultural and social signifiers.

Buildings can often be relegated to the background but can also contain all ones private thoughts, memories and emotions:
Within them we live out our lives. Evolving, destroying, living, dying. We love there and lose there.

They aid the construction of our individual identity whilst forming the foundations of society’s common identity.

Ever increasingly buildings are ephemeral and transient objects in our environment. I document these buildings. Fascinated by them. They make my heart sort of stutter, the huge housing estates and the seemingly lack of humanity. How utopia slides so quickly into dystopia. Yet somewhere in these places there are signs of light. A garden on a balcony...attempts of beauty and reform. You have to find something beautiful there so you can live, it may have just been the tree blossoming outside your window…

These places can feel like ghost towns even when they may still full of people. Lonely and sad. Their melancholy I understand. The pathos is a jagged kind of beauty.