I was delighted to hear that two of my drawings, The Dreamer and Catch Me if I Fall, were accepted for the 160th Society of Women Artists Open Exhibition.
Catch Me if I Fall 
The Dreamer
Open Studios West Berkshire and North Hampshire was postponed from May to September. It has emerged from hiatus with a spiffy new website and smart new branding. There may be a few creases to iron out (mostly in print), but it’s looking good!
You can find my page here: https://www.open-studios.org.uk/entry/2021/amanda-bates
I’m contributing work to two exhibitions that are part of the Open Studios. There’s the flagship exhibition, INSIGHT, held at The Base, Greenham. Over 100 artists are represented here. It’s a very sophisticated venue, but the exhibition is free – just book a ticket to help avoid overcrowding.
And in Basingstoke, eleven artists are represented at Proteus. This is a simpler affair, with no charge and no need to book, but the standard of work is still very high.
I will be at Newbury Contemporary Art Fair (30 July to 1 August 2021, rescheduled from May), where I have stand 26, which is a little larger than the stand I had at Surrey last March.
I’m really looking forward to it, from setting my stand up (it will be mainly black and white with the occasional burst of colour) to meeting interested visitors. It looks like I will have interesting stand neighbours, too – it’s always nice to meet the other artists.
I’m really rather thrilled to announce that the three works I submitted to the Society of Graphic Fine Art‘s 99th Annual Open Exhibition at Mall Galleries, London were all accepted. The exhibition is scheduled for 6 to 11 July 2021, 10 – 5pm (closing 1pm on the last day), and can be viewed online for an extended period (my work has been classified as Botanical).
The works are: Firmament, Standing Vigil and Greensand. I’m a bit behind on posting work at the moment, with only Firmament having its own post, so I have included summaries of the reasons behind each title here:
Overhang and Underash have been selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition. This year the exhibition will be online due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
The Discerning Eye annual exhibition is a show of small works independently selected by six prominent figures from different areas of the art world: two artists, two collectors and two critics. The selectors choose both publicly submitted works and works by personally invited artists. Each selector’s section is hung separately to give each its own distinctive identity. The impression emerges of six small exhibitions within the whole.
[…]
A virtual gallery will open on 19 November and run until 31 December 2020 showcasing the artists’ shortlisted works with commentary and introductions by the selectors.
From the Discerning Eye Exhibition page
I am utterly thrilled by this, and I’m looking forward to seeing who selected my submitted work and what they have to say about it.
EDIT: The exhibition can be found here. I am delighted and grateful that Beverley Knight and David Remfry RA selected my work.
I keep a list of exhibitions (past, present and future) on an external site.
Click here to open the list in a new tab.
This is where it all began. In 2011, I started a Blogspot for my art. It became www.amandabatesart.co.uk when I acquired that web address, and then it became blog.amandabatesart.co.uk. I’ve retired it now, to enable greater integration of blog posts with other parts of my new web site. Some of the content has already been transferred, some will be later on, and some won’t ever be. But the old blog is still intact, still blog.amandabatesart.co.uk and you can view it by clicking here.
You can see the new blog in its entirety by clicking here or from the footer menu (from anywhere on this site).