Travels with my Art Named as one of the Top 100 Art blogs in the World

There is a quote which has haunted me since I first heard it as a self-conscious, paranoid and self-doubting teenager. The quote was from one of my painting heroes and possibly the most confident and cock-sure artist of them all, Pablo Picasso, who said: “He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

As a self confessed pessimist this quote has sat uneasily with me through my education, my careers as a teacher and journalist, motherhood and now as a amateur artist trying to break into the world of art – I need to be told a million, no a million and one times, that I am any good at anything, long before I will believe it, and even then, I will convince myself that I am not. I have always struggled with the fact that to succeed, you need self-confidence and the more of it you have it seems, the better you will do. In short, if I am to believe in Picasso’s quote, then the fact that I think I can’t, means that I won’t, which doesn’t really bode that well for me.

However, when I recently received an email out of the blue telling me that Travels with my Art had been named by RSS reader Feedspot as one of the top 100 art blogs in the world, I had an extrinsic reason to say: “Hurrrrraaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”

Making it onto any international blog list in a time when there are billions of blogs around is an achievement, but when there are names like Colossal, BOOOOOOOM, and Canvas (Saatchi Art Blog)  on the same list, I was well, for want of another word,  gobsmacked.

Here is the full list of Top 100 art blogs from Feedspot.  I’m in at number 88…  which I am very happy with, although I am not particularly happy with any potential connotations with the two fat ladies bingo number – hopefully I’ll work my way up to 87 soon.

This gives me a chance to say thank you to all of you who follow, subscribe, share, like or even just read my content and to anyone new who has just discovered my blog, I hope you will stick around for more!

And those of you who regularly read my blog may know that a few months ago I came to a cross-roads in my career.  After finishing my Art and English teaching job, I decided to not take another education, but this time, to actually try and DO something with my art rather than just talking about it and keeping it as a hobby, after all if you are not getting paid for it, then it will only ever be a hobby.

This news has given me the impetus to continue, develop and work harder with both my art work and my blog. I am now in the process of setting up an online shop, where I will  be selling my art in the form of prints, stationery, device cases, home decor and clothes (check my Shop page for more information) hopefully in time for Christmas, so be sure to come back and check it out!  I will also be regularly updating any Travels with my Art news on my Instagram , Facebook and Twitter pages, so be sure to follow me there too.

Perhaps now it is time to start thinking that maybe I can do it after all.

A Selection of my Paintings

A selection of my photographs

A Selection from my Sketchbooks