Creating A New Art Studio Space

Heading to the mainland early last Friday to meet a garden room designer in Glasgow

The next stage of our move to Bute.

Since the New Year, Chris and I have begun to look into creating a new dedicated studio space where our current garage is. The original plan was that we would convert the garage into the studio. The day we moved in to the house it became obvious that this was probably not going to work.

Courtesy of Outside In

We’ve been looking at suppliers of pre-fabricated ‘garden rooms’. The photos above will give you an idea of the kind of structure I have in mind. It is all terribly exciting. Hopefully, it will all be done and dusted by July when I host my first open studio in thirteen years. There’s a lot to sort out between now and then.

In the meantime I joined The Isle of Bute Artists Collective - IBAC

That means I can join their summer studio trail and other artist led events throughout the year. I haven’t been part of any kind of art tour for thirteen years! I know from my days involved with The Northumberland Art Tour how vital it is for participants to step up and help out. When everything falls to a small group of enthusiastic people, they can eventually find themselves completely overwhelmed by the volume of work that’s required to make an event successful.

At my first meeting it was great to see how many people were stepping forward and getting involved in the various working groups. I’ve joined the IBAC Studio Trail marketing group. It’s a win win for me - best way to get to know people, hopefully make new friends and become involved in this lovely community. The first meeting is next week at Bonnie Bling, a jewellery shop come cafe (that serves really good coffee). I’ve already met Mhairi MacKenzie, through a former contact who worked as 2D curator at The Biscuit Factory Gallery in Newcastle when I first started showing there. Mhairi is delightful.

Earlier this week, I also met up with artist and illustrator, Ruth Slater, for coffee in her studio on a wild and stormy day on the island. Ruth came to my attention when she was featured in a BBC Scotland programme with Dame Darcy Bussell. I can’t remember what it was about but Ruth took Darcy out sketching near her house, if I remember correctly.

Ruth was so welcoming to her fabulous studio in her house with it’s amazing views overlooking St. Ninian’s Bay. It was blowing an impressive gale from the west so it was hard to see the view properly. I’m looking forward to signing up to some of her workshops, again as a way of meeting people and making new friends.

In other news,

We are marvelling at the efficiency of our local council. Chris got in contact because we noticed that a tree standing on council land in front of our house had branches that were catching on the telephone wires attached to a pole behind it. It was causing our internet to become intermittent whenever a gale was blowing in from the sea.

AFTER ^

< BEFORE

Within a matter of days (and before they were scheduled to start work) men arrived to deal with it and by the end of the day the tree was gone. Not only that but we’d asked something could be done about the ivy that was subsuming our stone wall but the roots were embedded on the council’s side of the wall. By the end of the following day all the ivy had been removed. We now have a completely uninterrupted view and we can see our lovely stone wall.

I’ll leave with another dawn photo taken from the ferry en route to Glasgow last Friday.