Cromer crab festival

My cousin Catherine Metcalf from Cromer, contacted me months ago asking me to paint a crab for Cromer crab festival which starts on Friday the 21st May. I told her I was off to India for a month, so she would have to deliver it while I was away. I arrive home to find a giant lobster in my garden that is far to big to fit through the front door. So I spent weeks and weeks deciding what on earth to paint on it and came up with so many ideas I could fill a book with them and had my friend Emma round to help workshop ideas. After my artist friend Kate Green pointed out it will take a long time to paint so best enjoy doing it. So in the end after deciding that all these art projects always have a theme which I have to work to and this project is voluntary. I would just paint with out any thought in mind and see where it takes me. Like a walk on the beach with out a care in the world.

This is stage two, stage one was two layers of expensive undercoat. Which was the last of my bread and butter money. Now I am down to old house paints mixed with some acrylic paints.

I was going to try and get someone to give me gazebo of giant tent for my 40th birthday so I could paint it inside the tent, but thought that is a big ask. I have been waiting and waiting for a good string of nice days to paint it and then they came, but then I could see a black cloud on the horizon and then began to take the pegs off the washing line and peg up the plastic cover that the lobster came in and any plastic bag that I could get my hands on. It all looked like a scene from a slum but looked like it could keep the water off my lobster. Then the next day I went in to the garden to find there was a swimming pool dangling like a big bubble over the lobster and about to burst. So I got a large stick to hold it up in the middle.

I tried to go out and paint the last few days but I have been in a bit of shock to find out one of my artist friends had died in a freak accident. So difficult to make happy art when under the weather. Sunshine please come out, so I can paint my Lobster.

The Lobsters will be on display around Cromer and you can follow a trail to find them. Then they will be auctioned off for charity.