Have you seen Zzebbraa? He’s a curious creature, an adventurer in nature, all outdoors, he is my vehicle for exploring the extraordinary in the everyday, he’s me!
I cut up my 25 year old Tartan Tin collection… now artworks for sale, unframed on a wood panel or box framed; contact hannahtofts@hotmail.com for prices
Art Classes: 10 weeks : 3hrs : pushing the advanced beginners to draw big in this icy winter: A1! Encouraging big arm movements, positive bold mark-making, looking at the negative shapes as positives, more light, contrasts and winter drama. Drawing dead ducks and pheasants, freshly wrung cockerels, rabbits, rams horns and dead dogfish! Their squeals made for fantastic drawing responses…
I’m always keeping an eye out for fruit and vegetable boxes, looking for those images, colours or patterns. Piling them high on my bike in Holland where the Albert Cuyp Market is a riot of thrown away printed inspiration, scanning the local fruit and veg shops, pleading with them for that last pink box…
I was invited to be a Collage Artist for Diversity Day at St.Georges Secondary School for girls. Over 40 Specialists in diverse fields such as the Quaker, Japanese Tea Ceremony, Belly Dancing, Mathematics, Meditation, Exploding Science, Street Dancing, Poetry and so on were asked to come and show, share and enthuse the whole school. It was a fantastic and utterly uplifting experience. The energy at the end of the day was electric!
I ran 6 x 45 minute back to back art sessions for 20 girls at a time who had chosen not to do Art, girls who didn’t like to make a mess, all with long hair and nice clothes…
…the brief was to cover an A2 board according to the blue, green, yellow areas indicated. All 450+ panels would be assembled in the gym at the end of the day to make a giant picture which nobody knew. We went to the hall with paint dripping, very textural panels…it was a massive collection of different art styles in each piece, amazing!
I like the theatre of a box. It’s a frame, a container, a platform for a scene to play with, for words and feelings, a collection of things, a mini world. I called this series Boxariums. I had already made a series of Aquariums. It began as an idea for a book about making; each box shows a simple technique about making with collage and paper.
I’ve been collecting odd bits of wood washed up on the west coast beaches in Scotland for over 2 years now, drying them out on my mum’s under-floor heating or on her AGA, much to her sighing patience….
I found some sail like shells on just 2 metres of the beach, and an odd box of broken wooden toys in the attic…I’ve never painted seascapes before…never worked with wood before…but with a wood-workshop on site, I started scrounging offcuts from the boys and odd house build sites…and with a pot of white emulsion, looked at my new horizons…
I made these seascapes to make into cards to sell by any coast…
…and then we hung an exhibition in a barn, and sold them all. The next series is due out soon..
