April was a busy month for a variety of reasons but one of the main things that seemed to take up most of my time and head-space since my last update in March was my first ever attempt at running a marathon. I did this on the very clement April 6th at the Asics Greater Manchester Marathon and in so doing aimed to raise money to fund arts workshops to be delivered to users of mental health charity Imagine. This is a local charity, based in Liverpool but with ongoing work nearer to Manchester in Salford too. I was keen to support a small organisation as I believe this means donations go further and one of the additional benefits of doing so is that it is possible to work closely with staff to ensure the cash goes exactly where you want it to. Having raised over £400 for Venture Arts last year by running a 10k race (my first of those too!) I thought I’d push it a bit and set a target of £500. I was absolutely delighted that I managed to inspire such generosity from friends and colleagues alike who between them have smashed that target absolutely to pieces by more than doubling it. It was then lovely to receive a thank you card and letter from the charity director and arts group service users and even better because what I didn't realise is that the existing arts group for Imagine is actually based in Liverpool, not Salford. They are now however, in a position to use the money we raised to initiate a whole new programme for delivering arts workshops in Salford which is a massive deal in this age of budget cuts for the arts and for health and I feel confident that my supporters have really truly made a difference to individual lives without their donations getting sucked in to a huge charity with massive overheads and generic budgets. If you are interested in more details about race day, you can read the update I wrote for the charity on their own blog page.
| While my feet have been busy, my fingers haven’t been left out and I have also been continuing to work on The Serenity Series, the working title of a new project that accidentally grew out of some photographs I took in Asia last summer, which then grew into the Peaceful Places collection. The latest of these pieces is a mixed media canvas (acrylic and collage) titled Impression Taiyuan and is developed from photographs and drawings made in two Buddhist temples in Taiyuan (in the Shanxi Province of China). I have no specific plans for the exhibition or evolution of this new body of work at the moment and am quite happy to just let it grow to see where it ends up. It’s quite refreshing to be producing work for the sake of it again as opposed to trying to achieve a specific goal, be that social or professional, so I am making the most of it! In other creative areas, I enjoyed a talk at CRITgroup this month by astrophotographer Dave Wilkinson and am especially looking forward to welcoming my teacher, mentor and friend Peter S. Smith to do the same in May. You can read more about Dave’s talk on the CRITblog and there will be more on Peter’s work soon after the next meeting on the 28th of this month. |  |
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