Day 2 at the last 15 Hundred Lives art event at the Creative Bubble Artspace in December and I continued to sketch out some of the faces of women murdered in Britain during the year, 199 at the time. Unusually I’m using canvas and some paint, along with oil bars which I worked into the canvas with rags dipped in linseed oil. The idea came from Karen Ingala-Smith’s blog, Counting Dead Women. It’s a harrowing indictment on our society that we still have not come to grips with serious violence to women.
I rarely do portraiture or work from photographs, but I felt inspired to honour these ordinary women, whose lives have been so cruelly snuffed out. The idea behind the events at Creative Bubble is to have the space for a couple of days a month to try out new ideas. I managed to do the sketching and quite a bit of underpainting for four of the women, but a lot of people came into the artspace and wanted to talk about what I was doing. It seemed to engage people far more than the work I’d done in previous months. It took a long time to get to this stage and I haven’t got any further with it as it doesn’t fit in with my business plan, at least for the first part of this year, so the canvasses have been rolled up, waiting for me to come back to them.
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