I have in mind a collaborative effort between me and some of the local businesses in the High street, which would involve bespoke paintings for display in each of the premises, supported by digital presentations available as videos, Instagram and Facebook posts, and comprising large scale images overlaid onto images of their premises. Overlays would also be accessible via the Artivive app should there be a viable signal but this is not something I can rely on. The exhibition would also include a talk at the local community centre which has both wifi and projection facilites and where I may be able to hang prints so that people can experience the augmented reality first hand.

There will be a great deal of preparation necessary as, the more I think about this and the joint enterprise it assumes, the more each piece of work becomes something of a commission – a piece tailored to the environment where it would be housed. This is not to say they will necessarily be congruous with their environment, just that they will speak to it in some way.

My strategy is to try to spend some time with the owners and, assuming they agree in principle, get a sense of what they envisage as benefits from something like this. If they ‘adopted’ a painting, what size would they see as appropriate and where, with a tour in mind, would they have space for it? While I’ll be looking at the palette evident in each place, I’d like to get an idea of what colours would they prefer; what, if any, artists do they like (no promises of a knock-off Van Gogh!) and styles of artwork?

Ideally, there would be wifi so that both the paintings and the buildings could come to life, and I may need to approach the local Chamber of Commerce and the Parish council to see if anything can be arranged. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, right?

This is quite a lot of ground work, but not impossible, and I can start with the people who actively follow me on Instagram as they already see my work, at least in passing. And there’s a pet shop where I may just be able to plant a large black cat or two!

Today, in preparation for the preparation, I began making palettes for two of the shops I’m hoping might be early adopters. This would make further recruitment a little easier.

Polar opposites, one is muted and contained while the other is a firework display of colour.

27th June. More palette work and a tiny speculative scene.

I’m quite taken with the way the solids separate out and leave ring marks as they flood out and gradually dry away from their tracks. The subject of this palette sells textiles, clothing, and artefacts from the Indian subcontinent. The speculative landscape is sky, foliage, and water. I’m interested to see what happens when the acrylic is fully dried out and I can pull some of the raised lumps off the surface. The next experiment will be more restrained and less full bodied.

This didn’t go quite as planned but the effect is interesting and at this stage, it isn’t dry yet so it will change. I’ve called it Weather Serpents which again draws on the original raison d’etre but in fact it means I should stop for now because it’s lost its fluidity as I’ve herded the marks around leaving marks of my own instead.

28th June.

Yesterday I wrote out a series of brief bullet points necessary to achieving my goal here.

• Preliminary information leaflet for photos and sketches:
• Sales of hosted paintings – offer the option of commission to the hosts.
• AR layers. Ask what the shop owner would prefer and what they really wouldn’t want to be associated with. I intend to be clear that there will be no nudity and nothing overtly political.
• Assemble a playlist of in-app videos to show potential hosts. Put these on a dedicated web page so that people can access them should in-store wifi be inaccessible to me.
• Critically, interview shop owners to discuss palette, style, and size of painting, and, for instance, to discover what they would want from the arrangement.
• Consider a tour. This may be difficult to manage as the high street is busy, the pavements narrow, and the shops quite small. Some would struggle if more than three or four people came in at once, especially as a group.
• The community centre in the town has rooms fully equipped with wifi and equipment for presenting talks. I gave a talk there a few years ago and, worryingly, I haven’t a clue what it was about!
• Some rooms in the community centre can be booked for exhibitions and I would consider using that space for prints of the show-specific artwork along with mounted pieces that may not otherwise be included.
• Requirements include personal flyers, which I have, and business cards which I also have, albeit totally inconsistent and therefore totally characteristic of me! I also need show-specific flyers to help with recruitment of, for instance, the local Chamber of Commerce, the town’s magazine, and the Parish Council.
• As part of the digital component, I would hope to put video material on the fronts of the buildings. These would not be accessible from the street, largely because it would be unsafe, but also because of the lack of phone signal. These elements would become part of a video/talk as another arm of the show.

The timing of all these intersectional contexts feels, at the moment, horrifyingly complex and means I absolutely need to know how the next two units are predicted to pan out. Are they the same length as 3.1 which is effectively 10×6 weeks, and can I shift things around to make the best of the summer weather? There are events in the Spring, such as the Art Trail and the town’s festival which might be handy opportunities to access larger numbers of people, but that might also have requirements of their own about when and how work can be shown. The Art Trail certainly does and it may not suit either of us as some people have their work regularly in particular shops.

SCH 2023

For a list of workshops, groups, conversations, and other activities see my dedicated page.