Last year, Craig and I created pieces for an art event in Inverness, and this year it’s being remounted, but bigger, at Eden Court. The “Highland LGBT Lives” exhibit will be on display throughout February as part of LGBT History Month.
This is the piece I made last year, which will be in the show again this year (though when I look at it, I can see how my abilities have inched along since then, but I figure there’s no point re-doing it):
Craig and I decided we should include some new work, so this is the piece I did after last weekend’s agonizing. The Bristol board turned out to be awful to work on, though. (I thought I liked Bristol board, but now it seems hellishly bleedy.)
And I’m not sure why, but we also felt we should include some other things. I still love this wee Wick gutter-woman, which felt in keeping with the Highlands theme:
And then I had a fish painting, except it was a mackerel, ’cause mackerels are pretty. Except that in Wick they fished for herring, so that meant doing a new painting. So here’s what I came up with (a happy accident; I nearly threw it out partway through):
The text is from Neil Gunn’s Silver Darlings, a beautiful novel set in this part of Scotland.
Craig also had a fun idea for a piece we could do together, called “Out/Not Out”, a comment on the kind of art gay men often buy for themselves, versus what they put on display when the parents come ’round:
