Cathy Spearing's top 100!

In the run up to the Somerset Art Weeks in September local artist Cathy Spearing is producing one-hundred works of art over one-hundred days all of which are for sale on her blog for £100 or less! Cathy is currently on day fifty and works so far have sold to buyers in London and the USA. A member of the Society of Women artists and the Society of Equestrian artists her work features highly detailed monochrome pencil drawings of animals as well as landscapes in oil paints.

It seems like an exciting way to both make work and generate a buzz of excitement and interest about your work at the same time, and as an artist myself I think it would be a fun project to take on but obviously needs a lot of dedication and commitment as well. I found a similar project was undertaken by Cornish artist William Peers recently too with one-hundred sculptures in one-hundred days and shown In The John Martin Gallery in London as well as artists like Antony Gormley who has recently placed one-hundred bronze sculptures cast from his body and placed them in the Austrian Alps. One-hundred of anything seems to be all the rage at the moment in the art world! It must be quite a contemporary way of promoting yourself as an artist because you are making your work more immediately accessible and people can follow the story and progress of your work. Does this compromise your standards of finishing a piece of work, if you have to complete something in a given amount of time? It is debatable but as an artist therein lies the challenge a project like this would bring. On the other hand work made in a day can be a lot less contrived and overworked than pieces worked on over a period of time. So there are pros and cons, but I still think its a really great idea though. I'd quite like to do a similar project but invite other people to produce the one-hundred somethings over one-hundred days and see what would happen. I'm fascinated by Francis Alys' project where he had three-hundred reproductions of the Saint Fabiola painted by three-hundred different people. The results were really interesting and the body of work as a whole was really visually stunning as each one was so different yet initially the same. Clever stuff and something to think about. Here's to Cathy and the next fifty days of her project. A brilliant idea!

You can buy and follow Cathy Spearing's progress as she blogs each new work of art everyday on: http://equinart.blogspot.com/

And you can visit her studio and meet the artist during the Somerset Art Weeks from the 18th September. Venue number 64 in the SAW catalogue.

http://www.somersetartworks.org.uk/openstudios/cathy-spearing-swa-sea