11th October 2018

MK Gallery Family-in-Residence

Been very much enjoying working with the Collins Family during their residency at MK Gallery.  We've been exploring book making, animation and stories, themed around clothes.  This Sunday 14th October will the culmination of their residency and we're inviting people to come along to the Project Space from 2.30 - 4.30 to explore their own creativity.  Participants will be invited to create handmade books, contribute to a giant animation and colour illustrations for a big story.

Full details here:

https://www.mkgallery.org/whats-on/family-in-residence-the-collins-family/

Saturday 14th July: Create Together, St Albans Museum and Gallery

Create Together, St Albans

Enjoying working on a collaborative project with groups of visitors at St Alban's Museum and Gallery.  Inspired by a wonderful installation by Susie MacMurray we are creating elements for a large scale piece using velvets, silks, sticks, bark and herbs.
Here are some pics of our work in progress:

And here is a detail of some of Susie MacMurray's work at St Albans Museum and Gallery; this is made from silk velvet and wire:

This Saturday 14th July I'll be inviting families visiting the museum to come and help with our collaborative response to Susie MacMurray's work.  Very much looking forward to it.

Draw Jam Sunday 17th June

Delighted to be part of the Let Us Leap festival in Hertford, inspired the painter Alan Davie: 

Sunday 17th June
Draw Jam by Jane Glynn & Michael Wright

11.00am - 4.00pm | Hertford Castle Lawn

Join us for a day of socialising and art making on the glorious lawn of Hertford Castle for our Draw Jam where anyone can come along to draw and hang out. Our two resident artists, Jane Glynn and Michael Wright will be on hand, loaded with materials from pencils to Chinese brushes, to guide jammers on their journey into spontaneous drawing from the imagination and to facilitate a series of gigantic collaborative drawings to be displayed in Hertford Library.

concertina book reminder

Been enjoying working in some schools recently.  This video about making a simple concertina book with a snug cover and spine is for teachers who have attended my CPD sessions on cross curricula bookmaking - it's not designed as a tutorial - more a reminder of what people already know! Hope it's useful.  

Friday 5th January 2017

Delighted to say that you can buy my tiny handmade facebooks at The House of Illustration shop near King's Cross.  They are handmade and bound, printed on cotton rag paper with archival inks: £10.00 each.

Tuesday 2nd January 2018

We have entered 2018.  Here's the last of the monthly flower paintings: December 2017

Looking forward to this year - hope you are too!

4th October 2017

I am spending this year making work about my life before and with our eldest daughter Bronwen and how she continues to be a huge influence on my life, long after she died.

Here's a picture based on my memory of Bronwen's kindergarten.

And here's a picture of our wedding day complete with baby Bronwen, aged one.

2 October 2017

Been ages since I've written anything here.  Here's a picture of an oil painting I made a couple of days ago for September:

and here's one I made a month ago for August:

Here's a photograph of the flowers drying on the table so that I can sew them into a bag and keep them safe.  I want to keep each of the bunches of flowers in its own bubble for as long as possible.  I now have a white bag of dead flowers for each of the flower paintings.  Not sure what for - at the moment all the flower bags are in a carrier bag labelled "Please do not throw away these dead flowers."

I'm also saving all the jugs and keeping them apart from the rest of the household vases.  Not sure whether anybody in the family will notice that all the vases are slowly disappearing - I'm trying to leave a few obvious ones but they are looking very tempting. 

A small selection of limited edition prints of flowers are available here:

I am still writing and drawing about my childhood and early life, including our daughter Bronwen who died a few days before her sixth birthday many years ago.  I'm hoping to acknowledge and celebrate her and also to examine some of the ways that her life changed our lives. I am fascinated by the way memory is fluid and I am sure that my childhood memories have been affected by my experiences with my own children.   

19th July 2017

Here's another oil painting of flowers from our garden.  Making one painting a month as part of a 2017 diary - you can see all the pictures and buy limited edition prints here:

Flower Print Shop 2017

Friday 23rd June 2017

Family Garden

Been a long time since I posted anything here.  This is a picture I painted today of roses from our garden.

I'm making a painting for each month of this year of flowers picked from the garden.

I'm also writing/drawing daily about my childhood and my children's early lives - I like the way different memories pop up, partly because of family anniversaries and seasonal reminders, but also because of my ever changing personal preoccupations - I am allowing myself to write whatever comes to mind - I hope to find some patterns later and expect it to fall neatly into chapters when I analyse it at the end of the year!

Here is a picture of a pull string strawberry music box that our daughter Bronwen played with when she was a toddler.  She could hum the song before she could talk: the verse of "It's a Small World" by the Sherman Brothers.  I have no idea what happened to it - it was very popular in 1983.

26th October 2016

Great 'Dress the Giant' drop-in workshop at Watersmeet in Rickmansworth yesterday.  This was a Big Draw event.  We all helped to create clothes for the giant child and then tried them on her to see how she looked. Participants were also invited to draw their own giants in charcoal on card and to make paper clothes for them.  One of the giant's dresses was made from wax leaf rubbings, another was created from stripes of natural materials and the last long dress was a mass of tiny patterns and drawings.  It as wonderful that so many people participated and the whole room was buzzing with creative energy.  Thanks so much to everybody who came to help us and to all the staff at Watersmeet for making sure that everything ran smoothly.  

Molly the giant is now standing in Artistsmeet with one of her beautiful dresses on and will be there till my show finishes on Wednesday next week.  

20th October 2016

Very much enjoyed the opening of my show at Artistsmeet in Rickmansworth last week.  It was great to show people work from the past five years of my ongoing visual diary.  Also loved running the 'thoughts diary' workshop afterwards as part of the Big Draw festival.  Thanks so much Elaine Johnson and all at Riversmeet for organising everything so smoothly and thanks to everybody who came along and helped make it such a nice occasion.

Great to meet Chairman Andrew Scarf and his wife Alison too.
https://threeriverschair2016andrewscarth.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/the-big-draw-steam-at-artistsmeet-12-october/

Next week I'm looking forward to our next Big Draw event: "DRESS THE GIANT" - a family drop-in event from 12.00 - 2.00 also taking place at Artistsmeet.