As an artist, rather than a nine to five existence, my
calendar year is marked with a series of events. As the Dowager Dutchess once famously
said, “What’s a weekend?”. A highlight of this artistic calendar is to have a
display stand at the Patchings Art Festival. This is like a four day holiday
where we get to meet friends old and new, paint, and generally chew the fat. In
recent times, what tends to follow this show is the monsoon season, which unhappily
coincides with a series of outdoor painting courses… A few years back, I was
asked to run a friend’s painting holiday in Northumberland. The Patchings
Festival had been hot.. very hot.. the following week the skies turned black
and it rained, and rained and rained… now Northumberland can be wet at the
driest of times. As I drove up the A1 to Hexam, the Highways authority closed
the road behind me due to a reservoir about to burst its banks. I reached my destination,
a small hotel and waded through the carpark to reception. The room I was
ushered into to do my teaching was as dark and depressing as one could want and
was only marginally better than the cheap B&B I had booked myself into down
the road. Each night I would lay in my bed listening to the rain lashing and
the wind howling through the broken window, wondering which student would be
the first to crack with cabin fever. Fortunately, there were some bright spells
and we did get out most days where I ensured working sketches could be
collected so that watercolours could be worked on in the dry albeit dark hotel
dining room.
Last year saw the wind and rain arrived on the last day of
the show, flooding through the marquee and running down the support posts,
ruining one artist’s paintings and banging and clattering the artwork on the
outer walls. Towards closing time the rain got more intense, just coinciding
with the traders bringing their heavy vans up to the exit to dismantle their
exhibits. Very quickly most went in up to their axles, we just managed to
escape from the carpark without getting stuck. One unlucky artist had to
abandon their vehicle which was consumed by the mud and declared by the
insurance a write-off. The next week, I ran a painting holiday around Rutland
Water. This time it was the gale force winds rather than the rain that caused
the problems. The south carpark had to be abandoned as the wind blowing off the
water made it impossible to even open the car doors to get out…
This year, Patchings made the unfortunate mistake of
delaying the show by a week so as not to clash with the Queen’s Jubilee. The
weather was unsettled right from the start the BBC started giving yellow rain
warnings which sounded like something out of Cynthia Payne’s autobiography… Overly
worried that they would do another Michael Fish faux pas, everything was over-egged
with dire warnings of terror weather. In truth the weather was pretty good for
most of the show but the BBC did seem to put a few off. Funnily enough, on one
day the forecast said it was raining, yet outside the tent it was sunny! Two
weeks after Patchings we have just seen one of the most horrendous storms over
our village in living memory. Hailstones the size of grapefruits rained down
causing untold damage to car roofs, guttering and greenhouses. This week I’m
running another painting holiday in Suffolk….
