The secret gallery’s blog

Oil on canvas           “Growing”                  Marianne Potterton     February  2009

After a while of using pure pigments and enjoying how freeing it is to paint in a looser way with them I have brought this enjoyment back to the oil paints too. it looks quite different because it is a different material but it feels more fluid like the paintings I did with the  pigments. In this painting the face is merging with the landscape as if it was growing out of it, like the flowers. Alan Watts describes the earth as peopling like an apple tree apples, that we grow and are not made.

I have just come back from three days of walking The Burren Way and back, I slept two nights in a tent, it was good to sleep on the earth and spend so much time outside in nature, I was also very happy to come back to my family and have a hot bath lovingly run for me. The Burren Way is a beautiful walk especially the tracks and paths where you can not see any houses from. Having walked the Camino de Santiago a few times, seeing the yellow or white arrows on a stone that was part of a style/seat, there were three of them on the way to Ballyvaughan, they were beautiful, thank you who ever made them for the walkers!

I had a wonderful Birthday yesterday, we ate mussels on Fanore beach and watched a beautiful sunset! I was able to take this  amazing Birthday present of a Net Book from James to blog from the beach, or I could have written if I had not been having such a nice time! My old lap top was killed by an earwig! That is why I have not been writing recently, hopefully now I will be writing from lots of weird and wonderful places!