​An embarrassing, and somewhat predictable, gap since my last post is largely due to my persistent mismanagement of time.  Making artwork always comes before managing my website, but when that has been for almost a year that is quite bad!  Apologies.
 
For the last couple of months, I have been working towards a new collection for the Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Spring edition.  I normally try to tie the collection together in some way.  I don’t want to make work that is all about the same thing or even that uses the same palette, but it helps my head to have a unifying idea…ish. 
 
For a couple of the pieces, I have looked at the feathers of British birds.  This is for several reasons. I am endlessly fascinated with the communities that they build, be as part of a massive murmuration or as a pair or even as individual hunters. The structure of layered and individual feathers is appealing to me. Sincerely wishing to not sound pretentious; the idea of formation, interlocking elements and community is important to me and I always want this to come across in my work.  On a visual level I’m really into how light and shadow alters colours on birds, and I’ve also tried to echo this in my work recently. 
 
One such piece is Jay.  Taking an Eurasian Jay feather as a starting point I’ve examined some of the elements such as stripes, layers, and vivid colour.  The colour is famously vibrant.  It certainly has a more famous and gaudier cousin in the blue jay, but i love the unexpected flash of blue in the Eurasian,

​I altered my usual style of folding to reference a wing tip.  For example, rather than folding half a square up in a blunt line  I’ve more gently pealed up one corner edge  to create a curved  gesture.

 This piece is contracted of several thousands of torn paper elements.  The majority have been hand painted but some are copper leafed.  I cannot tell you the amount of glue that went into this piece, pr how many paper cuts I acquired in it's creation.


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I delivered this large "wreath", as they call it, to Mark and Celine's apartment in London on Saturday.  I started the commission in October '21 so it was brilliant to see it installed.

At the beginning of the process Mark spoke to me about his love of oil fires at sea.  I assumed my calm face and listened on.  Of course he had a bunch of photos to show me, and then I understood.  I'm used to using the sea as the ultimate provider of calm, even when it's stormy, so his images completely challenged that.  Sea and fire, water and oil are both complete contradictions.  The idea was such an exciting and challenging starting point.  

SInce contrast is what we were both after, the first step was to work out a palette.  I upped the saturation from source material.  Mark and I were both keep to use more bright red than would naturally occur in fire.  I soon realised that palette alone wouldn't be descriptive enough, so at that point I knew that this would be a mixed media piece.  I made a few miniature studies for Mark so we knew we were on the same page.  He and Celine  picked their favourite and were very helpful communicative about their hopes for the piece.

In the end the mixed media included gouache for it's matte opacity and to contrast, gold, silver, bronze , aluminium, an unidentified and black metal leaf, I also used nail varnish for it's oiliness,, brusho ink, and metal powders, 

Obviously I got covid in the middle, but it was actually quite helpful in that it gave me 10 days of slightly feverish focus on the painting.  After the painting was done (about 3-4 weeks) I had the joy of assembling the chainmail which is always so satisfying.  I think there is a video on my instagram @esther.miles. 

Thank you to Mark and Celine for commissioning this challenging work, and for being so lovely throughout.

The finished piece is about 900 x 900mm.

In many ways it's all go this week. 
The New York Affordable Art Fair opened yesterday.  My first show with Affordable Art NYC was meant to be in spring 2020, so you can imagine how well that went.  My poor gallery spent a fortune shipping the work only for it to end up stranded in a container in NYC for months.  I have some work in Washington DC and in Boston, but New York seems impossibly glamorous to me, all the more since I have never been.

Very much on this side of the pond, I have a new piece in Herne Bay at Beach Creative this week.  My studio is upstairs at Beech Creative, so it's lovely to represent!  I am invigilating tomorrow afternoon  (Friday) if  anyone is about.  

I am trying very hard to get a collection together for Spring shows.  Two big ones are basically ready and several more are in the works,  I am attempting to be more ambititious with size and complexity, but this does mean things are taking a lot longer.  Having done quite a lot of teaching last term, I am only now able to fully focus on painting.  I see some long hours at the studio over the next month.   I actually like doing long focused hours and am yet to get bored, but I feel bad for the sake of the family, (said every mother ever).