ooooh we won! (well... almost.....)

what a glamorous time we had last week attending the Cornwall Today inaugural Awards at the Headland Hotel in Newquay.

We had been shortlisted with 4 other galleries from the whole of Cornwall and our fellow nominees included The Tate Gallery, Penlee House and Falmouth Art Gallery - so we were definitely the underdog amongst the big publicly funded spaces!

It was a very swanky black tie affair with a red carpet, lots of champagne and even goodie bags under our seats (it felt a little like being at the Oscars)

There were lots of categories such as Best Hotel, Best Charity, Best Attraction etc and when the crunch came and it was time to announce the winner of Best Art Gallery.......
we missed out to Tate, St. Ives - not wholly unexpected!

I have to admit to being very proud that we featured on such a prestigious shortlist and I was delighted to walk away with my "Highly Commended" award which is now sitting in pride of place in the gallery window.

me and my husband Dom proudly showing off our "Highly Commended" award

 
thanks to everyone at Cornwall Today for laying on such a wonderful evening of food, music and entertainment for us all.

Roll on next year, when I will double my efforts to beat those big public galleries!

click here to read a lovely article about us winning our award:

Penzance Gallery Owner Delighted

art fairs, famous people and giant lobsters...

what an eventful end to June the gallery had....

we packed up the van and headed off to The Affordable Art Fair in Hampstead where we had a marvellous (but exhausting) time meeting and selling to the great and the good in North London...

two rather tall bathing beauties check out the work of Fenella Elms

We were delighted with how our stand looked and we received a huge number of compliments about our artists work.

The paintings that we sold have ended up all over London and the UK and we even sent one Alasdair Lindsay painting off to Stockholm in Sweden and another off to Auckland in New Zealand.
We are looking forward to our next art fair which will be at Battersea this Autumn.

we always enjoy a little bit of Famous Person Spotting whilst we are at art fairs and this one provided rich pickings! We had lots of comedians visit our stand including Ricky Gervais, Michael McIntyre, Matt Lucas, Alan Davies, Paul Merton.... not to mention the odd politician and a giant lobster or two.... 

putting the final touches to our stand

 well we've had quite an interesting time of it at the gallery lately....

It was the private view for Alasdair Lindsay and Simon Pooley last Friday evening and Simon invited some of his fellow tango dancing friends along. 

Everyone got in the dancing spirit and danced their way through the exhibition enjoying the evening of champagne, tango and beautiful paintings.

It's a really fantastic exhibition and we've had lots of people coming in for a look since the opening.
The was a fantastic review of the exhibition in Cornwall Life magazine recently: "This exhibition brings together two West Cornwall based painters whose works are defined by a powerful approach to both colour and composition. 
"Simon Pooley's bold compositions and strong draughtsmanship have developed from his years spent working as an architect." 

"Falmouth Art School graduate Alasdair Lindsay has attracted significant international interest since his graduation and his works can be found hanging in private homes throughout the UK, Europe and America. Lindsay's paintings of the Cornwall landscape exhibit the expressive colour and vivid contrast of American abstract artists from the 1950's and have a compositional punch reminiscent of the retro art of advertising illustration."

 Two days after the exhibition opened, we had a rather well known face pop his head around our door.... the Prime Minister decided to visit Penzance and both myself and my artist Simon Stooks, who happened to be in the gallery at the time, were rather astounded to see him!

Simon decided to follow him out of the gallery and have a little chat with him. He gave David Cameron his last Cornwall Contemporary exhibition catalogue and David has promised to come to his exhibition here in 2014 so watch this space.....!

a visit from the local press...

we had a visit from the nice people at The Cornishman this morning to interview and photograph Alasdair and Simon ahead of their private view tomorrow evening


Alasdair's youngest daughter Tess wasn't entirely happy about having her photograph taken however, despite being bribed with chocolate....

the show looks fantastic and we're all looking forward to the private view.  There might even be a spot of tango dancing going on as Simon is a keen dancer and will have his dancing shoes on....

I am being expertly assisted in the gallery today by Ghibli. It may look as though he's lying back on the chaise-longue and taking it easy, but I can assure you he's got his paw on the pulse...

we were visited today by Lesley Double who is a journalist for Cornwall Life Magazine and the gallery will be featured in an article in the June issue which is great, really looking forward to seeing it.

Neil Pinkett - The Sea

Neil Pinkett in front of "Pendeen Light" oil on canvas

being ably assisted with the hanging by Ghibli

we are mid way through Neil Pinkett's exuberant exhibition "The Sea" and we've had a huge amount of visitors over the Easter break. The private view was extremely busy despite the unseasonable awful weather and people were thrilled to spot a certain famous face amongst the throng - a certain someone who has started to collect Neil's paintings.



there is just one more week to go until the exhibition finishes on 22nd April, so for those who haven't seen it yet, make a trip over soon to see the sea captured in all it's glory by one of Cornwall's - if not the UK's - best land and seascape painter.