Art drops for Christmas!

Sep 11

I'll be honest with you, because I always try to be: I am the worst gift buyer. Genuinely.
I'm much better at making something for someone than remembering to go and buy it - those are the ideas that sit with me for a while, take shape slowly.

I distinctly remember the first gifts I ever gave - I made most of them, of course. Mum got a drawn portrait of her wearing makeup, because I was obsessed with her 80s eyeshadow. Dad got a pen (lol), because I guessed he'd need one eventually - though I followed it up with a cup of tea I'd made him, so I like to think that counts. And my great-aunt got a hat woven out of straws for her to wear in the garden. It was a hot mess, full of holes, but I'd written "this is a hat" on the gift tag, so at least she knew what to do with it. In theory.

Shopping for a deadline is not my strength. Deadlines in general, if I'm honest. Which is a funny thing to admit, given I'm about to ask you to shop with me.

Every year around this time, deep into a big collection, I forget it's gifting season until it's almost too late. This year, watching other artists and small business owners roll out genuinely lovely offerings, it stopped me - what am I going to offer? Not everyone's in the market for a large botanical wall piece, and I understand that completely. What do you buy the colour-loving auntie? The artsy, cool teen who says they don't really want anything, but what they actually mean is they don't want something generic. Sometimes the answer is art - just not at the scale I usually work in.

It turns out I already had an answer, I just hadn't named it yet. Alongside the big scroll paintings, I've been working small - pieces that take an idea further than a sketchbook but stop well short of a giant canvas. It's become one of my favourite parts of the process. It's meditative. It takes the overwhelm out of a huge piece and lets me just play - try a technique, a palette, a texture - without the pressure of it needing to be The Big Thing. It keeps the wheels turning. Brainstorming through making.

So, glancing around my studio one day, I decided that this Christmas I'm doing something I did once before, a couple of years ago now, and loved: a weekly art drop.

Here are the deets: every Thursday from October 1st through to the end of November, one new small piece released - sometimes four at a time, always something a bit different, always at a price that won't wreck anyone's Christmas budget. Beautiful things for the home. A celebration of colour. My hand in it, start to finish, at a size that's actually easy to give as a gift.

It's a genuinely good trade, I think. I get to keep creating, keep exploring, keep that meditative small-scale practice alive alongside the big work. And you get first access to something a little bit unique, for someone in your life who deserves something special.