First Exhibition of the New Year

The Horse In Art

Friday 5 January – Sunday 5 February 2012

A high calibre exhibition featuring work by selected British artists – paintings, sculpture, jewellery and glass.  All work is for sale.

Donations and a percentage of proceeds will be donated to The Horse Trust.

Obsidian Art, Layby Farm (The Bucks Goat Centre), Old Risborough Road, Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire HP22 5XJ

Open daily 10am – 5pm, Sundays noon – 4pm

Below are the paintings I will be exhibiting

'Beach Ball' 48" x 24"

'The Gathering' 12" x 12"

'The Finish' 30" x 20"

December exhibition plus PRINT SALE!

The Association of Animal Artists are holding an exhibition from 2 -11 December at Derby House, Wrightington, Lancashire WN6 9RE.  I will have 3 paintings there so please take yourselves along to view all the art and maybe buy some Christmas presents.

And talking about Christmas, as a special treat in the run up and to help should you be wondering what to buy as a great Christmas gift, I am holding a sale of my Limited Edition Prints over the weekend 3/4 December where I will be offering a discount of 20%.  You can find my prints for sale at Etsy if you click here and to get the discount, you must use the coupon code CHRISTMAS2011.  Don’t forget to visit my Etsy shop that weekend as the offer won’t be available at any other time.

Fine Form Horse Auction

After the horse sculpture that I worked on being home for me to touch up the paint work, it was picked up on Monday and taken to Cheltenham Racecourse where it and the 9 other sculptures are on display in the run up to The Open Meeting over the weekend 11 – 13 November.  It will be whilst at The Open that all the sculptures are to be sold at a charity auction, each for a different charity, and further details can be found if you click here to visit the racecourse website.

My sculpture whilst in Cheltenham town centre

The Horse Sculpture is Home!

My horse sculpture that many of you may have followed the painting of and that has spent a couple of months in the town centre of Cheltenham for the Cheltenham Horse Parade, is back home for me to work on before it goes to auction in November.  It’s survived pretty well with just a bit of graffiti, which was obviously done by young ‘men’, lots of dirt and several scrapes.  The horse is in our garage this time so I could give it a good clean this morning before starting any painting.  Unfortunately, not all the scuffs and scrapes have cleaned off so I will have to repaint large areas but considering one of the horses in the Parade lost it’s tail, I feel mine got off pretty lightly.  Here are some photos of some of the damage -

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But as I have realised and sadly known for a long time, some people just have no respect for other people’s property so some damage was to be expected.  We also found out to our expense about people’s lack of respect this week as our house was broken in to whilst we were away visiting friends and family in Devon and dealing with family illness.  Lucky for us and unlucky for the thieves, we own very little of value so they only took my work camera, which is insured, and an old laptop that we had been going to get rid of anyway but the thing we’re struggling to deal with at the moment is just the fact that someone invaded our personal space and made our home feel unsafe.  I know that it will get easier to deal with in time but normal everyday actions are now overshadowed by the burglary and it will take time to get back to normal, whatever normal is!

New Painting

Last week I finished a painting inspired by my trip to the British Beach Polo Championships at Sandbanks in July.  We’d had a beautiful sunny day and it produced some stunning shadows and lighting which I adore for paintings.  I was drawn to this picture for the painting because of the shadows being cast on the sand and the clouds of dust being kicked up by the horses.  It’s a large painting, size 48″ x 24″ and took just over 3 weeks to paint.

 It’s hard to appreciate the true size and impact of this painting so I have also taken a photo of it on the wall along with a couple of my other large paintings ‘One Small Step’ and ‘Reaching Out’ which have just returned from an exhibition at Weston Park, Shropshire.

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If you are interested in ‘Beach Ball’ or any of my other paintings that I have for sale, please visit my website www.sallylancaster.co.uk for further details.

A Quick ‘Little’ Painting

This painting is of the extremely gorgeous RL, who I met last year when taking photos of him for a commission.  I was very lucky to get some extra photos of him and have been able to do a couple of paintings of him since the commission and he’s proven to be a very good model.  This painting is size 12×16″ on a deep canvas and is yet untitled, and may well stay that way until I have a brainwave and come up with something, or someone else proves to be far cleverer than I and provides me with a title as naming paintings isn’t something I’m very adept at!  He will soon be available to buy on my website www.sallylancaster.co.uk so please feel free in contacting me if you’re interested.

The Finished Sculpture

Yesterday I finally finished painting the sculpture after 14 days straight of working on it.  And it has just been picked up and taken away so the pressure is finally off!  I ended up finding my own photo of Istabraq because it would have been a shame to not complete the paintings and I also found old quotes from The Racing Post banner that I was first sent and researched the final horses Dawn Run and Arkle to find quotes/write ups for them so that people viewing the sculpture would know who each horse was and why they were legendary.

I believe the sculpture is now going to a studio with all the other sculptures to be varnished or similar and then they will be set up in their positions around Cheltenham from 1 August until 15 October.  If you’re ever in the area, please do come along to take a look and I also believe there will be a map of all the sculptures to help you find them.

The final photos show the last couple of paintings, the grey One Man and the bay Istabraq.

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Kauto Star

I really enjoyed today’s painting of Kauto Star, he’s such a lovely horse and it was a really fun pose to paint.  And I was done by 6pm which was a bonus.    I currently have one more painting to do of One Man and some quotes to write on, however there is also meant to be a painting of Istabraq plus some more quotes and some extra headlines but I’ve not received anything today so not entirely sure what will happen there…..

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As it is, I have a lovely night off tonight as it’s mine and Chris’ 5th wedding anniversary so we’re off out for a meal.  Best go de-mash my brain first and wake up a bit!! 

Brave Inca and Hardy Eustace

Wow, today was a bit of a marathon day!  Started at 9am and have just finished at 9.50pm!!  Brain is now not functioning very well so I will leave you with photographic updates of today’s progress…

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Moscow Flyer, Brave Inca and Hardy Eustace

I worked on Moscow Flyer yesterday but by 7.30pm I had to give up for the day so had to finish him this morning.  The thing that I didn’t expect from working on this project and that is the biggest problem is how much my feet hurt after standing for several hours in the same spot.  I started out wearing my slippers to see if they’d give my feet the soft support but today I’ve been wearing my walking shoes in an attempt to ease the pain.  But by about 5pm it’s really quite painful!  Quite looking forward to being able to sit to paint again one day.

I’ve also made a start today on Brave Inca and Hardy Eustace and will hopefully finish them tomorrow.

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