The Paint Club is a series of small paintings on panel made between 2020 and 2022. For many artists during this period, the idea of the studio as a sanctuary and means of momentary escape was undoubtedly reinforced. Many of us suffered great loss and hardship, and I began to see these paintings as a way of giving thanks for what I still had. I’ve long held that the studio is a unifying force among artists of all stripes, church-like and quasi-religious, filtering and slowing an often rapacious modernity. As my studio shielded me, I, in turn, protected these diminutive panels with frames made from whatever was to hand in the studio, occasionally embellishing them with paint or stain. I came to think of The Paint Club as within the historical tradition of votive painting, retablo perhaps but certainly transcending religious strictures- the basic shape of a studio in a landscape standing for some universal protector of Artists. 

 The Paint Club was exhibited at Newlyn Art Gallery between November 2022 and January 2023, with an accompanying book published by Antler Press and text by Kate Reeve-Edwards.