It’s at the Mall Galleries, i.e. on the pink street the Queen lives on, not the Bristol out-of-town shopping complex. Yes I know, it seems unlikely to me too.

The ING Discerning Eye is a show of small works selected by prominent figures from the art world. Each selector is responsible for their own section giving the impression of six exhibitions in one. I’m expecting mine to be in a dark and moody corner.

The exhibition opens tomorrow (Thursday the 13th of November) and runs until the 23rd. I’m really looking forward to attending the private view tomorrow and meeting up with some exhibiting artists I know and meeting others for the first time. I’m sure I’ll come back inspired.

The painting selected is “Have We Enjoyed Ourselves Enough Yet?”.

Have We Enjoyed Ourselves Enough Yet, 10 x 12 inches (ING Discerning Eye and RWA Open selected, Clevedon Selector’s choice).

The title is a saying of someone my wife used to ride horses with, while getting soaked to the skin and freezing on a hack she’d ask “Have we enjoyed ourselves enough yet?”. I thought the same applied to the trudging dog walker.

It was painted using the left over paint on the palette after finishing a much tighter plein air painting. I painted the memory of the dog walker I had just seen walking back to his car, he was gone by the time I started to paint him; I was sat in the warmth of my car with the wipers on intermittent. Those that know Portishead will know the backdrop of Battery Point.

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