Open Studios - great news

Great news - I will be opening my studio as part of Stroud open studios in the SITE 10 festival. This is my first time doing an open studio event so I am hoping will get at least one visitor! I am planning on bribing potential visitors with the promise of tea/coffee and home made cakes. So if you are reading this, what kind of cake do you like?

Displaying my work is going to be a challenge; how much to frame or mount? How to hang it? Should I fill the space? What about sketches and sketchbooks? (I always find it fascinating to see other people's sketchbooks.)

And (how) do I tell people about my work? This is my biggest worry. I'm terrible at 'sales' and I don't think that approach makes sense anyway. I always seem to be holding back, it's difficult to talk to people about my work with passion because the passion is in the drawing and my relationship to it.

In some ways people need to find their own relationship to the drawing because mine can't make sense to them; it relies too much on my own feelings, ideas and experiences. How do I connect to their feelings and experiences?

Thinking more positively; the people that do visit will have seen my catalogue listing and are likely to be interested in seeing and hearing about my work. I admit to being very curious - Who are these people? I am excited at the prospect of meeting them!

But for now it is back to planning. Does anyone have any experiences of open studios, or tips they would like to share?

Circus Drawing

I went to a great workshop; time circus drawing at Circomedia with the Bristol Drawing School. I came back with loads of drawings, here are a couple:

Most of them don't make much sense out of context but I am planning to develop several into sketches/paintings.

I've got two strands of ideas at the moment, the first is a developed version of the sequential movement drawings I did. The second is based on a couple of character portrait sketches that seemed to have more depth to them, quite poignant somehow.

I think it will be difficult to develop these further whilst retaining feeling of the sketches. There is always so much of the moment in quick drawings. I am sure that this is precisely what makes sketches both so appealing and so hard to develop. Can you resurrect that feeling? Should you? Is that somehow less authentic? Why? What does that mean?