Summer Paintings

Welcome back to my blog. Thanks for checking me out!

Here is one of the paintings I've been making in the studio this summer - in addition to the Strata series I showed you in my previous post last month.

For these Summer Paintings I used the invitation cards from our 'open studios' event earlier this year (Fire Station Centenary) and painted over the cards. You can just make out some of the original image beneath my brush marks if you look very closely...

  ©Julie Umerle. All rights reserved

         

Fire Station Centenary

Fire Station Centenary
Open Weekend
Saturday 21st May and Sunday 22nd May 2011

ACME Studios, 30 Gillender Street, London E14 6RH

Hours: 12pm - 6pm daily   
Nearest tube: Bromley-by-Bow on the District Line

This will be the first 'open' studios event at the Fire Station since 2007. Fifteen artists will be opening their studios to the public to celebrate one hundred years of the building.

Artists participating in this event: Briony Anderson, Gemma Anderson, Kate Atkin, Jonathan Baldock, George Charman, Melanie Clifford, Susan Corke, Richard Ducker, Robin Footitt, Haroon Mirza, Matthew Noel-Tod, David Osbaldeston, Emma Smith, Julie Umerle and Andre Wallace.

The building is a former L.C.C. Fire Station, constructed in 1911, and converted to artists' studios in 1997.

Hope you will visit my studio (studio F on the ground floor) to see my new work.

Look forward to seeing you there. All welcome!

One Hour Project

This is a photo taken in my studio (Acme Studios, The Fire Station, London), by Jens Marott as part of his project, One Hour, about artists and their working environments.
 
"One Hour is about artists and their creative space, be it on a houseboat in Hackney or in a council flat on the 11th floor, yet these creative people keep producing art.

There are studios all over England where artists can rent studio spaces at affordable prices, these spaces are either government funded or private run.

I have been lucky to be invited into each artist's creative space, to document who they are and how they work, for one hour."

Jens Marott
http://www.jensmarott.com/gallery_284435.html

A life of its own

Someone contacted me recently through my website about two large paintings she'd bought of mine about nine years ago. She sent me jpgs of the work and I immediately recognized the paintings. They were from a batch of work I'd consigned to a skip in 2001 when I'd moved from a large studio complex in London at Acme Studios, Carpenters Road, Stratford.

And those are not the first of the paintings that have since been resurrected from the skip. A couple of years ago another person contacted me about an early piece of work, which was from the very same batch of paintings I'd tried to discard.

When the studios closed, due to redevelopment of the area, many of the artists were sifting through their paintings which had accumulated over the years, having to make decisions about what to keep and what to discard. Some artists had to put work into storage, or just didn't have room in their new studios to take everything.

A friend helped me sort through my work. All the paintings I felt I could live without, being documented on slide, were discarded. I guess I must have consigned about ten paintings to one of the skips in the yard.

But I discovered that the work has a life of its own once it leaves the artist's studio, and there is no knowing where it will ultimately find a home. Sometimes a painting will change hands many times, people selling it on or giving the work as gifts.

Despite my best efforts to destroy those early paintings, they are still in the world! I have learnt from this experience - and now I always slash any canvases I wish to discard before I bin them. That way they are well and truly destroyed...