Our First Arty Farty Purchase

I've never really understood the whole art thing before. I've never really visited any art galleries or anything like that and have certainly never understood how anyone could be "moved" by art. This is all until we were away on our summer holiday to North Yorkshire in July - we went back to visit the same small place near Whitby that we have been to last year around the same time and also in the winter a few times as well.

While we were there we were recommended that there is a lovely art gallery and cafe in one of the nearby towns. As we were planning on having a walk that way anyway, to Grosmont, the idea of the lovely cakes certainly were a winner for me and my husband as well so why not go and have a look around.

It was lovely, only a tiny little gallery called The Geall Gallery. It's not one of these stuffy horrible places where everyone walks around in silence and there is no atmosphere, it is essentially a little cafe that just happens to have lovely art work on the walls. The major bonus of it (or very expensive problem really) is that all of the artwork that is up and around and about is for sale.

There are a couple of other artists that display their work there but the main one is Chris Gaell. His website is here. As we walked in we instantly fell in love with his work. Neither me nor my husband could believe how real all of the paintings looked and as they are all painted using a palette knife they are also really really tactile. They looked totally different close up to when we viewed then from further away but all of the time maintaining their amazing ability to appear completely real and almost photo-like.

They were slightly out of our price range on this visit to go for one of the large paintings that we really did love. Chris does some that are about 2m wide by 50cm tall and would look absolutely perfect above our sofa in our lovely newly decorated living room. I think that one of these might have to be a treat to ourselves at some point but will need some saving up first. Maybe this will be next years Wedding Anniversary to each other.

After looking around for a while this summer and trying to resist one of these lovely big pictures, I have to admit, we did finally give in and make a purchase.

We were looking at all of his slightly smaller pictures but couldn't quite find anything that looked right or would go in our living room (if we were buying real artwork it has to be in pride of place in our house) so we started to look at his smaller pictures. These are about 15cm x 15cm without the frames so not very big at all - they come to about 20cm x 20cm with the frames although the frames that they were all displayed in in the gallery were a really dark wood colour.

The scenes depicted in the smaller pictures ended up being our favourite scenes but we weren't really sure how just one of these pictures would look in our living room soo...

we might have ended up buying 6 of them...woops!

These were the pictures as they were displayed in the gallery - one of them hadn't even been framed yet

Chris very kindly agreed to change the frames of these as the dark wood wouldn't match anything in our house or especially the living room - he uses ash wood normally and stains this to get the dark finish but he had some untreated wood that he hadn't started to use yet for his frames. He agreed to treat this with a clear lacquer for us so that the wood maintained a more natural finish. This is the final result.

They are up in pride of place in our living room - I love to sit and look at they - they are directly opposite the sofa and in an evening our lamp even points in the right direction to light them up just perfectly. Yes ok, they were a lot of money (if you can't tell, I'm still slightly shocked by our extravagance with these) but they are one of my favourite things that I have ever purchased. I love them so much - they just make me smile every time I look at them and, I know this may sound slightly crazy but they definitely change each day. Sometimes the water in the Beck looks a lot clearer than others and the light coming through the trees in the picture in the top right definitely looks brighter some days than others. I almost feel like these are little windows to the outside where I can see what is happening in each of the places.

And that is definitely enough soppy, crazy talk for today. I'll be posting again shortly with more of my own crafty things and my recent makes.