Dear Members,
Natural attrition of our membership has meant a number of new members have joined LAG in the first half of 2022; I believe this small turnover is healthy and keeps our group dynamic. A warm welcome to those of you who have joined us recently and I hope you enjoy being part of the group! If you haven’t already done so do make sure you familiarise yourself with our website, which was completely re-vamped last autumn and re-launched in November 2021.

As a member you have your own gallery space to use on our website so please take advantage of this facility if you haven’t already. Please send up to six photos initially (remember to give each one a title) of the paintings you want to display in your personal online gallery to Elspeth Wales at lacockartgroup21@gmail.com

You will have noticed the absence of a newsletter recently, which is because your committee decided that a monthly newsletter was too frequent. We agreed to publish a newsletter on roughly a quarterly basis, after a demo and/or an exhibition. A less frequent newsletter will allow for more and improved content, and we’re mindful that people can quickly suffer email overload with content dropping into their inboxes on a daily basis. 
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Additionally, Elspeth has been configuring the email marketing tool, Mailchimp, to distribute news items automatically (including newsletters) that we post on our website blog page. We can also use Mailchimp to email out other content relevant to LAG. The overall goal is to communicate to members from the Lacock Art Group email address, creating a consistent approach, rather than sending emails from various personal email addresses. Using Mailchimp also allows us to create GDPR compliant mailing lists easily. Subscribers will receive news updates from LAG, and we are aiming to broaden our audience of non-members who may be interested in signing up to our mailing list to receive news about upcoming demos, exhibitions and other activities. You will notice there is now a ‘subscribe’ button on our news/blog website page – if you know of anyone who might like to subscribe to receive our news please point them to that page.

Our second exhibition of the year took place over the Jubilee weekend on 4-5 June. The weather was not particularly kind to us and, with Thursday and Friday being holidays, the village seemed eerily quiet. That said, over £1,000 of sales were achieved, so proceeds easily covered our costs. My thanks go to those who volunteered their time to help set up, man the desk, steward and take down the stands. Many thanks in particular to Linda Ridler who provided the van to take the boards to Ken Baldy’s house ready for a professional painter to give them a fresh coat of paint. We received numerous suggestions for improvements to the exhibition from members, which we’ll be assessing.

​The re-instatement of “vote for your favourite painting” slips and the striking floral voting box were well received by visitors. Children in particular took part and offered a welcome distraction to their parents.

I know you’ve all been waiting to know the results so here they are: 
190 votes were cast in total. 82 different paintings received a vote.
And the winning painting, with eight votes, was ‘Bengal Kitty’ by Karen McGreevy. Congratulations Karen!

​On 19 May Mike Skidmore demonstrated his technique of painting a portrait using oils. Mike’s delivery was amusing and informative and made it look easy! He gave us numerous good tips on equipment, one particularly good example that I liked was the use of foil “Lazy Susan plates” to organise your oil paints, with the base flesh tone being in the middle well and the other tones in the wells around it. A big 'thank you' to Mike for such an enjoyable evening.

Several non-members, mostly from Box Art Group, attended the demo, and it was great to welcome them. Overall the feedback was very positive. There were some comments about visibility, so we are reviewing our decision to stop the use of the cameras/projector for demos and work is in progress. We will not make recordings of demos, however, because the quality of the end product is simply not something we would be happy to post online; the skills or time to perform editing do not exist within the membership. Additionally, some artists now do not want their demos to be recorded unless they are paid a higher fee.
Here are a few images taken at the demo: Mike Skidmore; his finished oil painting; and the audience.

Finally, a reminder for you to check out forthcoming activities on the events page of our website.
​Thank you.

To find out about demonstrations and exhibitions coming up please look at our events page.

​Melissa chose grey as the ‘mother colour’ made from burnt umber, French ultramarine and white. She then mixed blobs of this with various blues, red and yellows to give a cohesive range of colour and tone. Her canvas board had been prepared with a ground of burnt sienna in acrylic.
 
After making a loose sketch on the board in a mid-tone grey with a brush, she then turned to palette knife and started to fill in areas of dark and light from the pre-mixed colours on the palette. The scene really started to come to life at this early stage.​