MG:What is your favourite kind of day as an artist?

ISM: My favourite days are when I’m beginning work on a new exhibition. But I don’t always leap in action, brush in hand. I’ll kick off the day with a session of yoga in the garden or, even better, a set of tennis with a friend.

If I’m travelling, which is one of the great pleasures of being a landscape artist, I like to get to locations early. If there’s nobody about, particularly if I’m visiting somewhere touristy, I have more freedom. I can find the best angle by climbing on a wall, standing under a bridge or, occasionally, blagging my way into somewhere private with a great view.

This kind of research is tiring but, fortunately, over the years I’ve developed a sixth sense for finding a decent cup of tea.

If I’m working in the studio I like to warm up by painting a few possible beginnings for pictures. They may evolve into something, but often they’re just a way of getting into gear. That done, I’ll draw for a while, getting to know the subject I’m thinking of painting and then I’ll tape some watercolour paper to a board, paint the sky and leave it to dry.

Music is very important to me (I trained as a musician) and it really affects how I work. A late Beethoven string quartet is a great accompaniment for a complex piece of architecture but, if its a lively, expressive landscape the Beatles, Stones or Bob Dylan usually seem to help the work along.

Sometime in the afternoon I’ll knock off and take a walk round the market place outside or further afield and then have a cuppa with Josie (my wife and owner of Masham Gallery). 

The evening often involves some red wine and I’ll sometimes read about somewhere I’m researching, usually with a cat on my lap. I love to find legends about my subjects - it often adds another of meaning layer to the picture. Then  its early to bed and up with the lark again!

There are fewer and fewer galleries on the high street these days. So many I know have closed in recent years, and of course there is so much talk about the death of the High Street.
Before lockdown I was talking about this to our fantastic framer, Tim Tenant from The Art Shops, when he came to deliver. We were musing on how the High Street has looked like it’s dying -although in Masham right now (despite the virus) three* new and exciting shops are opening. Tim’s reaction when I voiced my worries was perfect - and that was reflecting on the fact that we’re not JUST shops, that art and craft is not JUST a product.

And he’s right - in fact I often feel I’m far from just a shop. People come in to chat, to find a calm space, to experience, to feel part of a creative community. Experience on all sorts of levels, some visitors come to experience an exhibition, with no intention of buying, but perhaps to understand the viewpoint of the artist who created a work, to experience the emotions that went into it, and to react emotionally themselves.

For some people, lots of people in fact, buying art is also buying an experience. It connects with an emotion, it represents something we sometimes can’t put into words and it goes home with them and they connect and feel that, through the art in their own homes. When you buy a piece of art, or craftwork, you buy a piece of an artists skills, the love that goes into making, their perspective on the world  - and often at a crazily reasonable price. It’s often something that stays in your home forever and eventually gets handed on to children or friends.

I’m finishing this blog the day before we reopen after lockdown and I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to being part of that experience. I know Masham Gallery is not another shop selling just another consumer product that can be disposed of on a whim or will go out of fashion, or even have some kind of built in obsolescence. It’s an experience, whether you choose to take that home with you or not.

* The Curious Merchant (right next door to us - looks very exciting), The Lunchbox - just 2 doors down and a refill shop just behind us on Park Street.

Simple Pleasures - an exhibition March 2020.


We tend to plan our exhibitions at Masham Gallery around 18 months in advance, so the title and concept for this show came about around late 2018. It was later in 2019 I think that I had listened to this BBC programme that a friend had kindly sent me. At that point I felt all our exhibitions in 2020 needed to be around the ideas of what makes us happy - content - or how we can find moments of joy in life.
That’s not easy when life is as tough as it has been for many of us this year, or as it was for Brecht in 1954. But somehow we all need to find those simple pleasures, if only for the safety of our mental health. So four of us got together who work in the gallery occasionally  - all of us artists - and listened to the programme again and discussed our own (ever growing) lists. Then we looked at artists work which represented those pleasures, and I took great delight in bringing together a cohesive exhibition of these lists (SO much harder than I expected).
 I hope you’ve had a chance to see the exhibition in real life, or perhaps online after we had to close on March 20th. It’s staying online and on our walls for the foreseeable future right now. Please do listen to the programme as well, maybe make your own list, and I sincerely hope that it helps you get through these dark uncertain days too.

​Josie