Week Notes: mid-June, 2025

Here in Hastings the summer is starting to manifest itself in the form of warmer and sunnier days and, consequently, the number of tourists is starting to rise. That’s good for all the local small traders, but a bit of a pain when you’re trying to walk down the narrower streets.

My artistic practice

The next Hastings Arts Forum members exhibition is scheduled for the last two weeks of August, so I’ll probably submit a piece to that. I may also have sniffed out the possibility of a small-scale solo exhibition in Hastings towards the end of this year - absolutely nothing has been confirmed as yet, so I can’t give out any details at this point.

I’ve also recently sold (subject to confirmation & collection) a print of an older linocut, so maybe my sales are starting to turn in a more positive direction after a long period of near-nothing caused by the cost-of-living crisis, Brexit, and so on. I know the saying that “one swallow does not a summer make”, but you’ve got to get things restarted somewhere.

I do still need to find a handful of life-models from Hastings & St Leonards (and other nearby places). I can afford to arrange occasional life-drawing sessions with life-models from Brighton or London that I’ve worked with before, but I have to pay their travelling costs on top of paying £30 per hour for their time, so that’s not financially viable for my plan of fortnightly life-drawing sessions.

That said, I’d definitely work with some of the non-local life-models I’ve worked with before, but just not every fortnight.

Currently reading

• Fiction: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (re-reading for the umpteenth time),
• Factual: No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit.

Currently watching

Well, nothing’s going to beat season two of Andor (which I wrote about last month) for some considerable time.

I haven’t really settled into watching anything since that series ended last month, but that’s not unusual because I don’t watch many series. Something will come along that piques my interest soon enough.