Every Thursday from 2pm until 4pm.
No experience necessary, open to all ages, all abilities.
First session free, every further session £3 per person, includes refreshments.
Materials can be supplied.
In October 2023 an appeal was launched to find this missing miners’ strike banner, which had been carried by women from south Wales.
The flag, which shows “a strong militant Welsh woman”, was waved by the Women Against Pit Closures group at rallies and protests during 1984.
The group wanted to find the banner for the 40th anniversary of the strike, when a rally is being held in Durham in March 2024 for the National Women Against Pit Closures 40th anniversary group.
After placing various appeals on social media, TV and newspapers, sadly, there was no sign of the banner being located.
After a few months of no success in locating the banner, the group made a decision…..they would have a new version made in homage to the original.
This was when they were put in touch with me, by Joseph Dickens of Elektra Designs.
This was my final design based on the original banner:
The banner in action:
“Around 20 years ago I was painting a lot of abstracts and semi abstract paintings, then in 2003 I went to university and did a BA degree in Fine Arts.
When I came out of that my art had changed dramatically, I decided that I was only going to paint commissioned murals and never try to paint individual paintings or show in a gallery ever again. I think it almost destroyed my creative spirit, I lost complete confidence in producing abstract work because I didn’t have a ‘concept’ behind the work, I thought my work had no meaning or depth.
Over the past year or so, I have been drawn towards creating abstracts again. My favourite way of working is intuitively, having no end result in mind and just going where the painting takes me. Many times I end up with just a muddy mess, but sometimes something amazing happens. I have come to realise that my best work doesn’t need a concept or meaning, people tend to find their own meaning in the work.”
This was a post I put out on Facebook this week. It began as a comparison between my early abstract paintings (like the one above) and my more recent pieces (below).
I hadn’t painted abstract work for around 20 years, and I put this down to the fact that I stopped painting them when I did my BA in Fine Art from 2003 – 2008.
I hadn’t intended this post to be a negative prose about the degree, but after reading the comments that followed, I realised that a lot of the artists I am friends with on Facebook had also had bad experiences with a Fine Art degree:
“My Fine Art degree totally shit on any enjoyment of making art for me. EVERYTHING had to have a fucking concept and that concept had to be anything except joy.“
“Totally agree with you both! Struggling to ever make work again… preferred the joy of gardening!”
“I had a similar experience. 4 years pretty much wasted.”
“I agree sadly, I lost my way. I loved painting but my faith in it became destroyed. Sorry to say.”
“I didn’t paint during the 5 years either, because ‘it didn’t seem to be what was required.”
“Your post gives me hope. Thankyou. I know exactly wot you mean.”
“I realised it wasn’t for me when one lecturer told me to stop painting colorist abstracts on card, which I loved doing at the time. He said, ‘you need to stop doing all this…’. I was like, eh!?”
I then tried to look back and work out why I had wanted to do the degree in the first place. I was already an established artist and regularly sold my work. I had already worked out that I preferred to do public murals but hadn’t analysed why at that time.
So why did I want to do a BA in Fine Art?
Well, my main reason was that every time I tried to submit a proposal to bid for a public art project, if it was funded by an Arts Council organisation, they would only consider applicants with a degree. So I thought I could use this course to thoroughly research the history and development of murals and get those precious letters behind my name at the end of it.
I soon discovered that Fine Art seemed to be more about the ‘concept’ than it was about the art. “Concept” to me just meant the “Art Bollox”. And I really struggled with it, always believing that my art should just stand alone, let people take what they want from it!
The course totally put me off ever wanting to make art to show in galleries ever again, and I didn’t actually paint (other than on walls) for around 10 years after the course had finished.
At one point I remember one of the tutors telling me I should step outside of my comfort zone and try something I had never done before. I had never stopped doing courses in various art forms since I left school, so the only thing he could find for me to try was performance art, this was totally going against my reasons for doing the degree in the first place!
What did I get out of the degree?
I do want to add that it wasn’t a totally negative experience. I did enjoy learning some of the art history and some of the tutors did understand what I wanted to get out of the degree and they were very helpful in pointing me in the right direction for my research.
I learnt a lot about the origin of murals and realised that I wanted to specialise in ‘trompe l’oeil’, the trick of the eye type, which required a lot of realism in the work, a million miles away from painting abstracts.
I also did get those precious letters behind my name, which I rarely used! I came to realise that any project that was asking for applicants with a degree, wasn’t a project I would want to be involved in.
I don’t want to put others off doing a BA degree in Fine Art, I know many artists have said it helped them to find direction for their art. But I do want to add that many of the students I knew from university went on to do many other jobs, not many actually became full time professional artists.
And the saga continues! We still have a huge number of Coronavirus cases spreading across the country, with new strains developing. Will things ever go back to ‘normal’?
Throughout 2021 I continued to host Zoom painting tutorials on behalf of the VC Gallery every week. Some fantastic work was produced by my students throughout the year!
In March 2021, I moved house, which was a bit chaotic, trying to find a man with a van during lockdown, but we managed in the end. The new house needed quite a lot of work doing to it, but it’s slowly coming along.
I now have my own studio, which makes life a lot easier than trying to work from a table in the living room, which I was doing previously.
I managed to complete 3 small murals this year. I found them more of a struggle than I have in the past, due to the development of arthritis in my hips. Bending, sitting and standing are all painful after a short period of time, but I felt a huge accomplishment at managing to finish these, even if they took me a little longer than I am used to.
I also had a few commissions over the year:
I also had some time to paint some canvasses for my own personal fun! These 2 are my personal favourite pieces of 2021, firstly a tribute to John Lydon and secondly Carmargue Horses:
It will be interesting to see what 2022 has in store!
Well what a year that turned out to be, I doubt that anyone could have predicted that!
When lockdown first started, nobody could have guessed that it would go on for so long.
Initially for me, it was just like a normal ‘down time’ period between mural projects, a time when I am stuck at home with no work coming in (and no money). So I didn’t panic, I just went along with it and tried to look at alternative ways of working. It was quite pleasant to have some time to slow down and relax, knowing that, for once, everyone else was in the same situation.
I decided to treat the whole thing as an opportunity to produce some art that would be unique to this time, so I started to document events by painting things that were ‘out of the norm’. One of my first pieces being ‘Bog Roll with Coronavirus Wallpaper’ to represent the panic-buying that went on at the beginning and the 3 week quest I had to buy some toilet roll, as we only tended to buy one pack at a time and ours was nearly all used up!
I had always wanted to make some online tutorials to share my working techniques with artists who were starting out and I knew that, in normal circumstances, I would never get around to doing this as I didn’t have the right camera, lighting, set up, etc. I would have spent way to long writing scripts, that I wouldn’t have been able to follow while I was painting and then would have been way too critical of my own work and the way I had portrayed it and would never have got them edited to a standard where I would have been happy to share them with the public. But an opportunity came up for me to share my studio sessions as live watch party sessions on Facebook on behalf of the VC Gallery in Pembrokeshire, as they were no longer able to hold classes in-house. I then downloaded each session, edited it and uploaded it to YouTube. Nearly a year later and I now hold a resource stock of over 60 videos that can be used for artists starting out or as a reference source for various techniques. You can see them by clicking the link below:
As the months glided by, I discovered I had so much free time and started to think about what else I could do with it!
I started to enter a few painting competitions and actually won first prize in The Big Lockdown Art Challenge Wales with my entry entitled ‘Celebration’ which was a representation of life after lockdown.
In April, as part of my live watch party sessions, I produced 2 ‘Coronavirus Collages’ representing keyworkers and messages about them from recent news items.
The postal worker who posed for the painting was my sister, she asked if I could donate the original painting to her depot, which I did. This then went on to get featured inside Courier Magazine, the Royal Mail in-house magazine that goes out monthly to all staff.
On Instagram a new initiative entitled ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’ was started, whereby artists offered their services for free by placing an ad on the page and then waited for responses from NHS keyworkers.
I decided to give this a go as I had quite a lot of spare time and was inundated with requests. I managed to do 3 before I got too busy with other projects;
Clair Miller, dietitian working on the acute wards at Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen.
I also came up with the idea of thanking as many keyworkers as I could in my piece called ‘Suicide Squad of South Wales’.
In June we briefly came out of Lockdown for a short few weeks and I managed to paint my one and only mural of 2020. Again thanking keyworkers, this was painted on the garages on the corner of Augustine Way, Haverfordwest. Pembrokeshire, working with the VC Gallery. The rainbow was a symbol of lockdown, as it turns the corner it begins to break up and becomes a flock of birds to represent getting our freedom back.
Since then we have been in various versions of lockdowns and the messages became more and more confusing, which inspired me to produce a piece called ‘(DON’T) GO TO WORK’ featuring Boris Johnson and all the differing messages that we have been given related to lockdown:
As we now enter 2021, the future is still so uncertain. We are still in lockdown here in South Wales and as yet don’t know how much longer this will last.
I am still continuing with my online art sessions, as well as the Facebook live watch parties every Wednesday at 12:30, I now hold two Zoom tutorials each week. The first on Tuesday Mornings at 10am until 12noon and the second on Wednesday afternoons at 2pm until 4pm and they can be accessed through Ticket Tailor at this link:
Buy tickets for The VC Gallery (tickettailor.com)
Here’s to a brighter future!
ninacamplin.co.uk 