The first guests walked into the gallery. How appropriate their timing!  I was exhibiting in the beautiful mountainside village of Deia, Mallorca, at the Hotel Belmond La Residencia's Sa Tafona Gallery, and who should be the first arrivals but William, son of long-time famed Deia resident, Robert Graves, with his charming wife.  What a wonderful augury!

This exhibition was the culmination of long effort, so often the case.  First, that of having my idea accepted for exhibition in the gallery and eventually being given a time period to show, then creating and preparing the work.  Finally came the hanging of the work, quite a complicated affair,  and organising the inauguration or vernissage, complete with posters, invitations, Whatsapps messages, press contacts and so on. In other words, more or less the usual process of an art show.

This exhibition, Pensando en Miró : Drawings in Silver, led me on a fascinating journey to create 30 silverpoint drawings. Because the gallery is a large room, I needed to work in a larger format, up to 30 x 22" or 76 x 56 cm. images, much larger than my usual drawings. As always when one is pushed to new horizons, it is good and when I finally got the show hung and looked at the results of many, many months of work, I wondered how others would react to this new series of seemingly abstract drawings.  I say 'seemingly' because in fact, I based all these drawings on the wonderful translucent alabaster windows of the Fundación Pilar i Joan Miró and the naturally occurring patterns in their flagstones.

As more and more people walked into the gallery for the show's opening, I was touched and delighted. Many of them had come from Palma, a 40-minute drive along mountain roads, a real compliment. Soon an animated buzz of Spanish and French was occasionally punctuated by snatches of English or American, and the evening took off. 

Was the effort of creating and mounting this exhibition of silverpoint drawings worth it?  Definitely, from any number of points of view - professional, creative, personal and more. The experience just underlines for me the fact that being an artist is richly rewarding in many, many ways, some subtle, some obvious, but all sustaining in the onward journey of trying to create art.