2010 Round Up

As the year rapidly draws to a close, it's time to reflect on what's happened over the past months. For us it's been a great year: we launched our blog, visited lots of galleries, exhibitions and other art events, talked to dozens of amazing artists, began to build up a collection of pictures, ceramics and other art and generally had an arty kind of year.

It's difficult to decide what the highlights of the year have been, but after much discussion, here our some of our favourite things from 2010.

Favourite Picture

Rosita, our own Mona Lisa. We discovered her in a charity shop and almost passed her by. She now keeps an eye on the comings and goings from the corner of our living room. This is an intriguing portrait that has given us lots to discuss and we are sure it will continue to do so.

Favourite Ceramic

Mortimer, the toucan has a unique style, dramatic colouring and a personality all his own. He has a comfortable little perch on top of the electric meter cupboard; an ideal vantage point to watch the world go by through the front window.

Favourite Place

Richmond Station in North Yorkshire. This rennovated railway station is not only a versatile and active venue for displaying and selling art but also a very popular focal point for local residents and tourists alike.

Favourite Artist

Where do we start? We've met so many and admired so much of their work. As we've chatted with them we've discovered a wealth of artistic talent and enthusiasm. So we have to say that they're all our favourites. We thank them for their interest in what we are doing and look forward to seeing them and many others we have yet to meet next year.

Vicky And Vince,
Love Your Art.

Art In Malta

We're just back from a lovely trip to Malta. The island is strategically located in the Mediterranean Sea, just south of Sicily. Having been occupied or administered by Phoenicians, Romans and British amongst others, it is steeped in history. But despite this varied history, we weren't expecting to see much in the way of art.

However, we had barely got off the plane before we encountered our first piece of Maltese art. As we entered the airport terminal building we passed a modern sculpture called Flight (pictured). This was the beginning of an art journey through the ages.

Our first trip out was to the capital, Valletta, where crowds were celebrating Republic Day. We had been led to believe that everywhere would be closed but we found all the shops open. These included quite a few art shops selling contemporary paintings, ceramics, glass and jewellery.

Whilst in Valletta we also visited the Casa Rocca Picola, a splendid 16th century palace now owned and occupied by the 9th Marquis and Marchioness De Piro. As everyone else was watching the Military displays in Republic Square, we were given a personal tour by the guide and were able to spend more time looking at the things we found particularly interesting. Every room was filled with pictures, including family portraits dating back to the 1500's, local landscapes and other interesting subjects.

Later in the week we returned to Valletta to visit The National Museum of Fine Arts. On display are a large number of pictures by artists who were either native to the island or who had visited there. The dates range from the 1400s to the present day and many of the earlier pictures are in a Caravaggistic style. Sadly, we missed seeing some of Caravaggio's own paintings which are in the St John's Co-Cathedral; we arrived 15 minutes after it had closed. If you're not familiar with Caravaggio, you can read more here.

Moving back to Roman times, we visited the domus museum at Rabat, near Mdina. A small display of artifacts did not really prepare us for the splendid mosaic floors that had been unearthed here. Sections of mosaic were also on display around the rooms. Some of these were made with tessera only few millimetres in size. The exquisite detail must have taken a team of artisans months to create.

Going back even further in time, the Hypogeum in Paola is a series of prehistoric underground burial chambers dating back between 4000 and 6000 years. This amazing feat of architecture carved out of the limestone to form interconnected chambers is the last place you would expect to find art. But in some of the more recent (if you can call 4000 years recent) chambers, hexagonal and spiral patterns painted in red ochre could just be made out on the walls and ceilings.

What we had planned to be a simple, relaxing holiday with visits to a few historic places, turned out to be a fascinating exploration of the history of art in Malta.


Vicky and Vince,
Love Your Art

Letter To Santa

Dear Santa,

We are looking forward to Christmas very much and have been very good boys and girls all year. We have built a worthy collection of art and supported several charity shops at the same time. We haven't written nasty things about controversial artists or their beds and we haven't knocked over any expensive Chinese vases.

Please stop at our house on Christmas Eve. We will leave you two mince pies and a glass of sherry as well as a saucer of milk for Rudolph.

Here is our list:

Tickets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, inclusive of flights from Heathrow Airport. We want to have a thorough look round the gallery so we will also need two weeks accommodation at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Plus a bit of spending money for the shops.

An art lesson from Banksy. This will let us decorate the outside of our house in a stunning fashion and increase the value of our home by about ten million times!

The Tate Art Collector card game. This will keep the family occupied when they visit and with our superior knowledge of art we will always win!

Finally a picture of sunflowers to brighten up the Winter days. The one by Van Gogh looks quite nice and we will make every effort to find a space on our wall for it.

Finally, finally, a year's supply of Pringles crisps so we have something to nibble on as we admire our own little art collection.


Vicky and Vince,
Love Your Art

Colours Of The Landscape

We were hoping to visit Ann Whitfield's exhibition at the Witham Gallery in Barnard Castle this weekend and were disappointed that other commitments made this impossible for us. We've come across Ann's work a couple of times recently and had made a mental note to take a closer look and hopefully chat to Ann to find out more about her unique style of painting.

As luck would have it, Ann had read our blog and invited us to visit her a couple of weeks ago for a chat and to see a broad range of her work. So we wrapped up well against the early snows and trekked along to Barnard Castle.

Ann began to focus on painting landscapes around eight years ago when she and her husband, Terry, moved from Dorset. She is inspired by the scenery in and around the Dales but rather than make a realistic depiction, she prefers to give a slightly abstract feel to her pictures.

Working with acrylic paint using a palette knife, she sometimes incorporates other materials in the pictures including tissue paper, gold leaf and metallic foil (apparently Green and Black's is the best - both the foil and chocolate!). The tissue paper gives an interesting texture to the paint and the foil and gold leaf adds an extra dimension when it catches the light.

On the face of it, her choice of colours (not that it's really a conscious choice) are unusual. But the lively purples, oranges and pinks are used by Ann to express her emotional response to the subject matter. She recalls a visitor saying that her pictures were "full of joy". We have to agree, they are quite uplifting and very different from conventional landscapes.

Apart from the colours, Ann told us that she likes to portray the hills and valleys accurately so that people are able to recognise the places. She and Terry often go walking to find interesting and unusual views for Ann to sketch and subsequently paint. She finds that fellow walkers like to see and buy her paintings and love to relate stories from the locations they are familiar with. We'd also like to visit some of the locations in Ann's pictures to see them for ourselves. But perhaps we'll wait for the snow to melt first.

The exhibition is running from 10th to 15th December 2010, from 10am to 5pm each day. Ann is sharing the exhibition gallery with Anne Mason, another popular artist from nearby Eggleston.

Ann also has a selection of her pictures permanently on display at her home and is pleased to welcome visitors. You can arrange a visit by email (info@annwhitfieldart.co.uk) or take a look at Ann's web site.

Vicky and Vince,

Love Your Art

The Art Of Geometry

When you think of art, you don't normally associate it with mathematics. But an artist we met recently combines her skills in both art and geometry to create distinctive carved ceramic works. We met Halima Cassell at the preview of her "Dreams Made Manifest" exhibition at Darlington Arts Centre and again a few days later when she gave a talk about her work.

Easily recognisable, her unique style comes from her observation of patterns and their transformation into three-dimensional forms. She takes inspiration from the patterns she sees in Islamic architecture and Asian and African designs.

A versatile sculptor, Halima occasionally works in bronze, stone and wood but her favourite material is clay. Using a variety of clays from around the world she first makes the basic form then calculates, measures and marks a geometric pattern into it and finally carves out the three dimensional pattern. The resulting pieces have individual colours and textures and are described by Halima as "faceted forms"; they reflect light and produce shadows creating a sense of movement as you walk around them.

As we browsed around her exhibition, we were delighted to see that almost all of her pieces had names (we've lost count of how many times we've visited exhibitions where everything was labeled "Untitled"). Halima told us she usually comes up with the names herself but on the odd time she gets stuck, she simply invites a group of friends around, opens a bottle of wine and by the end of the evening, somebody has usually come up with a great name for the anonymous piece.


Halima is a remarkably talented artist. Her imaginative ideas and observational skills combined with her dedication to quality and precision make her work popular around the world. Yet she remains down to earth, friendly and accessible to her fans (which now includes us); she can explain her work equally well in both a technical way and in a simple, jargon-free way that even we can understand. We look forward to our next encounter.


Halima's web site is at www.halimacassell.co.uk.



Love Your Art

Vicky and Vince