Hope you all had a good festive holiday and are looking forward to the new year.
I took part in a couple of Christmas Art Fairs, the last being in our town's Art Gallery and Museum.
It's known as the Royal Pump Rooms and that is exactly what it was. This rather grand building was built in 1814 to allow townsfolk to partake of the natural spa water that had been discovered 30 years before in 1784. This murky, salt saturated, green, foul water was so popular with the wealthy London set that Queen Victoria, in 1838, changed our town's name from Leamington Priors to Royal Leamington Spa.
They obviously believed the old wives' tale; if it tastes awful, it must be doing you good!
And so here I am selling my wares in this grand building, as I'm sure many hundreds have done before me.
Top left of the picture are a row of Edmund de Waal's pots. He held an exhibition here a few years ago.
I used these Christmas fairs to see what people thought of my new porcelain collection. I was pleased to find a very positive reaction. And I was also pleased to be asked to exhibit and sell a selection of it in the Art Gallery of this historic old building.
I looked up some of my old designs in my sketchbook, tweeked this and that, used a lot more colour and painted with bolder strokes.
Here are a few pieces that I experimented with.
All were painted with underglazes at a bone dry stage before bisque firing. Then all dipped in a transparent stoneware glaze.
"Feelin' Groovy"
I think I must have been when I made this!!
I took a break in writing this post here because the doorbell rang, and to my great delight the piece of pottery that I have been waiting for has at last arrived.
Here it is as I took it from its box. The ceramic poppy is one of 888,246 that were made for the art installation 'BLOOD SWEPT LANDS AND SEAS OF RED' at the Tower of London.
It is the work of Paul Cummins and it commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War 1914.
They are individually hand made. No two are the same.
It arrived with it's metal stem, all rusted from the London weather and I love it.
Just off now to look at it again...
HAPPY POTTING FOLKS
AND HAVE A VERY HAPPY 2015
