Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating open weekend at the Phoenix Studios in Brighton. There are over 100 studios over 6 floors which gives a wonderful glimpse into different artists’ worlds. I love the fact that each room smells differently because of the variety of materials they use. We set the whole afternoon aside to go round and spent time chatting to artists we talked to last year and meeting new ones. There was a small exhibition on the ground floor highlighting the work of some of the artists under the theme of Present Tense.I liked Oliver Hain’s installation projecting a live feed of the traffic outside eon the floor also Kiki Stickl’s lines of pencil and silverpoint drawn directly onto the wall. Highlights of the studios themselves included Natalie Papamichael’s wonderful Caravaggio inspired paintings. It was fascinating to see two large pictures commissioned by a London club being worked on in the studio. We had a chat to Denise Felkin, who had changed the theme of her display to p...

Stunning open studios at Phoenix Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival. We went along thinking we’d be there about half an hour and staggered out three and a half hours later having seen some wonderful art and had some great conversations! Almost too many favourites to mention! We headed first for our friend Eve Shpeherd’s studio. She produces wonderful sculptures and it was great to see works in progress in the studio as we usually only see her finished works at her open house. We had a long chat about a classical head she was working on and about how it had been commissioned and how she hoped to develop it from its current neat classical form. I was delighted to find a photographer whose work I’d seen earlier in the week at the Sony World Photography Awards, Denise Felkin, whose current series of pictures looks at women who have not had children. I’ve attached a picture of her work to this post. They are lovely caring pictures. She was kind enough to give me a c...