Jackie Adshead - Where my life and art are intertwined

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Friends old and new celebrated through Christmas cards

Friends old and new celebrated through Christmas cards

I do love Christmas as a time for getting in touch with friends. I write a lot of Christmas cards and love the communication of them. I always use my own images for the card itself so I also communicate with my artwork trying to find one that encapsulates the year for me, it might be a wild animal, dancers,  or a someone mysterious in a feathered mask. Since I get my own cards printed I can choose the overall message that I want to convey in it. And of course it will mention somewhere on it that I painted the picture, the title of it,  my website details, and maybe other contact details too.

But as well as that I love to put a note or small letter to pass on information or news. I send cards to people I’ve worked with many  years ago, my artist friends, my extended family (having loads of cousins scattered around the country), people who have bought artwork from me, people I hope will buy artwork from me, and friends old and new. There are always new people to add to the list each year, and the occasional one that unfortunately falls from the list due to their sad demise.

I love to hear from my friends too, eagerly reading their news and smiling at their happy achievements. We might only write to each other once a year but I love that connection of comunication. I have had cards every year from an English couple since I met them whilst on a tour of west coast USA in 1995 always telling each other of where we have visited this last year and are planning on visiting this coming year. I have cards from old friends I’ve known literally all my life, and good friends I have known less than a couple of years. I exchange cards with the people I bought this house from, and from people who have bought a lot of my paintings from me, people I’ve met at art workshops, and people fascinated with my artistic career. All good friends.

I've been an artist all of my life, and my paintings now hang on walls in Europe, USA and Canada. I'm working on getting them on the other continents! My wide range of artwork has been exhibited nearer to home in the East Midlands, with the Guild of Erotic Artists at Beaumont Hall Studios in Hertfordshire, and at "Erotica", Olympia, London. I have also been featured alongside my work in the Guild of Erotic Artists book (volume 2). I love to create dramatic interest in my pictures, whether it’s to paint an unusual landscape, or just to utilise dramatic lighting in my figure drawings or strong colour in my animal portraits. Delighting in the spontaneous tendencies of watercolour adds an interesting and distinctive look to my paintings, some of which are purposefully ambiguous, enabling the viewer to use their own interpretation of my artwork. I also love to hide images, and humour within my paintings, whether it’s a secret message, or an erotic couple hidden within a landscape, or even an erotic landscape where the couple are camouflaged as the features of the land itself. I am equally happy painting in oils, acrylics or watercolours and love to draw with pencil or ink. I have also developed the very effective method of drawing using white pencil on black card which creates dramatic pictures by just picking out where the light catches the body and leaving the rest of the image to the imagination, in darkness. I can also utilise many different styles, whether it is realistic, abstract, surrealistic, erotic, fantasy or camouflage art where something is hidden within the painting. I'm just passionate about my art, whatever I paint! But, it doesn't matter how many landscapes or pet portraits I paint, its always the erotic stuff that people are interested in! I started blogging to share some of the strange conversations I have with the people I meet. But its evolved into far more than that now.

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