Hilton Feast Week Art Show

Our village has an annual feast week - a week long celebration with events on the Green and in the marquee. Running alongside that is an art exhibition. This is open to all villagers and with a number of different categories, from painting to craft to photography. The exhibition is open for a number of days during this week and visitors are asked to vote for their favourite work of art. The winners are then announced at the afternoon cream tea on the Green on the Saturday afternoon.

Very glad I went along because....

alongside the "Lonesome Pine" screenprint and the "O'Keeffe Lily" in pastel, I entered the "Oriental Poppy", which I had only just painted for the Hilton Open Gardens event.

Well - it got first prize in the adult painting category, which was absolutely brilliant.

The Hilton Art Club also had a section to display their work and show what they get up to. In that section I exhibited "Laurel Berries"  (that and the "O'Keeffe Lily" are paintings I really love and thoroughly enjoyed doing - interesting they are both in soft pastels) and "Sea Holly", which is, of course, one of the latest acrylic ink/soft pastel paintings.

At least this year I had a wealth of painting to choose from - last time I only had a few and had to get them framed quickly to get them on display, whereas this time they were all ready to hang.

Getting the votes from the public is great. If a judge awards you, then it is just one individual making a personal choice. However, loads of people came through the door to view the exhibition - and the children were allowed to vote as well, so I was particularly pleased my style appealed to lots of people.



However, that isn't all.....

After all the awards for the individual categories, there is the Best in Show award for the person who obtained the most votes overall for their submitted work.

Well I was called up! Really pleased, understandably, and so glad that my work is liked by that number of people.

I have actually won this award before, but looking at my mantlepiece, I realised it was quite a while ago - 2005! What have I been doing for the last eight years? Oh yes - doing my A level Art and the Open College of the Arts modules! Those took up rather a lot of time and so didn't have much time to do good work to enter. Anyway, I now have a great body of work for any forthcoming exhibitions, although I have a lot of ideas for future paintings as well.

Talking about future works, I have a couple of short art courses coming up at West Dean College near Chichester this year. The first one is in loose, experimental watercolour, which is right up my street - and that is for a whole week. What heaven to be in a location where there are only creative people and being told you must paint for seven days! Luckily there are family members at home looking after the place and the two dogs.... The one later in the year is soft pastel on top of a background of acrylic. Again, I love pastel and would dearly love to advance my technique in this medium. The artist for that course is someone I have been following for a while - Sarah Bee. I absolutely love her work, giving an impression of the view, rather than a more photographic rendering. Her website can be found here, if you want to see her work: Sarah Bee, Painter  I first found out about her in Artist and Illustrators, a great magazine. Since then she has been mentioned quite a few times in different magazines. Really excited about this one, as I feel I could progress well and start adding landscapes to my existing repertoire. As I love walking in the Alps and my Mum lives in Devon, I have a wealth of beautiful landscapes to choose from. Obviously the scenery is less dramatic where I live near the Fens in East Anglia, although sometimes the flat landscape can actually turn out quite dramatic with the right colours/light etc. Anyway, having found that I don't work well doing a remote learning course like OCA, this is going to be brilliant - short courses with tutors and other students and, as it is residential, I'll be able to talk to the other students in the evening as well - bliss.....