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robert
collins
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new exhibition |
12 Monday 16th January 2012 3.30pm Extreme ironing, extreme makeover, this must be extreme painting. I’ve just caught sight of myself in the mirror on the way into my studio after finishing painting outdoors. All my layers of clothes with a hood and a hat on top I look like a tent with a face and all covered in paint. It is bitterly cold outside and I need all these layers to keep warm. We have had a series of bright cold days and clear frosty nights, beautiful sunsets. When I came up here today it was not only cold but windy, a daunting combination. I saw the farmer again on the way out. He said the sun never gets to the north side of the valley. There is still ice on the roads and frost under the hedges and across the fields, it shows white on the shaded side of the valley in my painting. He told me if you go up there even in April and scrape the ground in the shadow of a hedge it will still be frozen solid. But even in this cold there are still primroses in flower in the sheltered hollow just along the path from my painting spot. When I was about to set up my equipment Victoria Rees walked by. She and her husband Peter are both artists and live in the house tucked right up under the hill in the woods on the very left of my image. She was amused by my cold weather clothing but invited me to go and sit for a portrait dressed in my painting clobber one afternoon when I have finished working up here. There is a bright sunset and the sky is casting an orange glow where the light skuds across the valley. Long late afternoon shadows in the field at the bottom of the hill.
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