Colouring the Tunnel
Making a fresh start in a new place is always both exciting and challenging. There’s the excitement of making new discoveries and meeting new people on the one hand, counterbalanced by a sense of disorientation when you don’t know where to do mundane things such as get a car wash or have a good hair cut. And, of course, it takes time to establish really strong bonds with people and there are times when you really do miss the ones you already have with now-distant friends. Making a phone call, lovely though it is, is not the same as seeing someone face to face over a cup of tea.
When work is the reason for your move there’s always the chance to forge new friendships among your colleagues, but if you are a freelancer who works from home that is not an option open to you so you have to find new ways to connect with people.
I’ve been, lucky enough to connect with some wonderful people since moving to Mallorca last November - Read my January Musing, On Forging New Beginnings. The internet and social networking have really made that very much easier, but for some reason I still haven’t actually started meeting up with fellow artists despite efforts to reach out through social media. So the prospect of change on that front is very exciting.
The Artists of Mallorca group kindly accepted me into their ranks as a member and have also accepted my work to be part of a midsummer exhibition that will take place in the Tunel in Soller, in the west of the island.
One of the conditions for putting work into the show was that the work should not be on paper because the tunnel is humid and paper will not fare well in damp conditions. This left me with a bit of a dilemma at first because all my most recent work (and much of my older work) - lithographs, drawings and watercolours - are all on paper. Another restriction is the size of the paintings because of the height of the tunnel, so that ruled out several of my large canvas works.
A 5m-long run of wall will take quite a lot of art.
In the end I decided to get out several canvases that I had started in oil many years ago, but never finished. It was a series of paintings inspired by frangipani (plumeria) blossoms that I had seen during a visit to my sister in Maui that had totally enchanted me with their abundance and variety. I had forgotten how much an impression those flowers had made on me until I looked at the photos that I took at the time and found myself thoroughly enthused all over again.
After so much time using earth colours and muted greens on the tree collection, it has been exciting to get the old oil paints out again - I’ve had to cut the bottoms of the tubes on some of them because, after so little use over the years, the tops have become too encrusted to get off! - and exhilarating to work with bright colours once more. Hopefully vivid pinks and reds and blues and yellows will glow with light in the dark tunnel space. Curiously there is one of those paintings that I did finish off long ago that, surprisingly, always looks better when hung in a dark place. So I called it Glow in the Dark.
The Tunel Exhibition inauguration will be on Saturday 24th June and the work of the sixteen participating artists will be shown through to the end of Sunday 25th. You can find details here. If you’re in Mallorca at that time, please do come along to see us. If not, I will eventually add a collection of the work that I put in on my website. If you are interested in seeing it, send me an email to register your interest and I’ll let you know when it is done.
After that my sights will be set on getting together the collection for a legacy exhibition in November which will be a timely end to my 75th year! That will be happening at the beautiful Can Beneit Finca Hotel in Binibona near Inca. More anon!
