ARTWORK, WEBSITE WORK AND A TRIP AWAY

It's nice to be able to have new paintings to show you (above). One is a commissioned work of the tour boat "Dunter III" at one of her regular destinations, the cliffs of Noss, which is one of the largest seabird colonies in Britain. It was featured in the recent BBC production of "Simon King in Shetland". The other painting is a "stock" work which I've entitled "Tall Ships Seascape", which features, strange to relate, tall ships at sea! A second completed commission, of Lerwick's south end, slipped through the net as regards getting it photographed for representation here. My clients seemed well satisfied with my efforts - you'll have to take my word for it!

Two more commissions came my way this week, so I'll be starting on these shortly. In the meantime, I've been putting more work into another stock work featuring tall ships - I hope to have this as a feature on this blog within the next fortnight.

In view of the fact that I have no mainland exhibitions booked for this year, and, taking into account that I have concession travel vouchers to use from April onwards, I have decided to take a trip to the mainland at the end of next month. So I made the necessary bookings, including a night's stay at one of Aberdeen's Premier Inns. This is a totally unnecessary extravagance, and will be a new experience for me, as I've never stayed in one of these establishments before. Watch this space at the end of April for a Michelin Guide-style report on it! I was pleasantly surprised when I heard how much my ferry fares were costing - being over 60 definitely has its compensations!

My friend, business adviser and web designer, Igor Mournly, paid me one of his regular visits on Monday afternoon, and quickly dispelled any illusions which I may have harboured about life getting easier in the near future. The website upgrade is going to take an awful lot more work over the coming weeks and months. He was showing me how to go about creating a proper archive page to contain images of previously sold works and fulfilled commissions, and I was frantically taking notes on the procedures involved. These involve large images AND thumbnails, along with internal links between them, and I am not a little proud to say that I have since completed the "Commissions" archive, which is now "live", largely by accident - I just forgot to "hide" it. After further consultation, we decided to leave it as it was. It can be seen at

http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/Commissions.aspx

Your opinion, as always in such matters, would be valuable - let me know what you think. You can click on each image on the main page to get larger images. Now I have another archive to create, this time of other non-commissioned "sold" works - and it's bigger than than the "Commissions" one. I'm really looking forward to a time when all this - the product database, "basket" and "checkout" functions, and narrative sections, as well as the parts already described - is ready to "go public".

A north-easterly gale is sweeping the islands as I work towards getting this post done. Altogether, it has been a fairly satisfactory week from the point of view of productiveness. My family are keeping well, which is even more important to me, and I hope for more of the same in both categories during the seven days to come. I hope it's the same for you!