Albany Gallery & Sugarloaf

I delivered my paintings to Albany Gallery this morning, six paintings for the their mixed Xmas show. I haven’t shown there before but the Cardiff location seemed like a natural fit, seeing as I’m painting the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. The staff were all lovely, hopefully we’ll have a decent show despite these uncertain economic times. If you’d like to go, it runs from 11 November - 7 January with the private view next Friday 11th Nov, 5-8pm.

After visiting the gallery I drove up to Sugar Loaf mountain, near Abergavenny. It marks the start of the Black Mountains and provides some spectacular views across to Pen y Fan. I took my new mountain bike, a titanium framed Sonder Broken Road. Sonder is the bike department of one of my favourite outdoor companies, Alpkit. It’s designed for Bike Packing, with very wide 2.8” tyres and a pannier rack on the rear which means I can take all the painting gear, food and clothing I need for a full day in the hills. It’s all pretty heavy when fully loaded, but you can cover a lot of ground far quicker than you can on foot and the descents are incredibly fun. Combining my love of cycling with painting is something I have been wanting to do for ages, so it’s very satisfying to finally make this happen.

Sugarloaf is steep. I managed to ride about 70% of the way up before getting off to push to the summit. It was all worth it though, the weather was doing exactly what I wanted it to; scattered cloud and bright sun, casting gorgeous purple shadows across the Black Mountains. Perfect. I met some lovely hikers up there and a few even took my picture for me. I love outdoors people!

I set up my plein air stuff and got to work on a painting. Working outdoors is always challenging, but on the summmit of mountains, it’s even harder! Weather changes very quickly, it’s cold and windy and I chose to paint seated because I didn’t bring my tripod to save weight on the bike. The clouds were moving quickly across the hills so the painting was more an approximation of what I was seeing rather than my usual direct transcription. It wasn’t my greatest piece, but it was good fun.

I decided to wrap up when I could no longer feel my hands and throughly enjoyed the incredibly steep and rocky descent off the summit on my bike. Woo hoo! More of this!