Collaboration/ Trade piece.

A long overdue piece of work finally completed this week. It's my collaboration and trade with ceramicist Denise O Sullivan. You can visit her online shop and links to her other websites about her practice via this link http://www.deniseosullivanceramics.com/

We had agreed on doing a Trade of each others work way back at the start of this year, as we both became increasingly involved in the Exchange project and struck up a good professional connection and friendship.

so long story short i fell in love with her ceramics and wanted some!!! We agreed upon a trade, a tea set for a painting. I let Denise set the brief, which i don't usually do as i wanted the piece to work like a commission.

I have to say the piece took several attempts and canvas going the way of the bin. It should have been really simple on paper. I admire her designs, style, subject matter etc but it was hard to translate that into paint. We both work in two very different medias. Eventually i settled on something which involved a figure, which relates to my work. Because of her love of vintage and Kitch I went for a 50's style pin up. I decided to keep it simple and base it on her rose collection which is my personal favorite. I used a very muted palette of varying shades of white and pastel colours for the roses. After all her canvas (the ceramics) are white china.

I really enjoyed using so much white and dealing with the subtleties of the different tones of grey etc. Which don't really show up to well in the photo