Around 100 Wandsworth artists have opened up their homes as temporary galleries to create an Arts Trail across part of south London for the first two weeks of October.
With slightly sore feet and a close eye on Google maps, we managed to find three out of the four intended locations before closing time.
We visited part of the trail on the second weekend of October, having just recovered from Tooting Foodival and Tootopia which both took place in September.
At our final stop, we met Jane Armstrong, an alumna of Chelsea College of Art who was tutored by Peter Fleming; her painting career of two years has been preceded by a lifetime of sketching, but she told us that she has ambitiously practiced oil painting for only five years.
Armstrong is in her sixties and the best advice she had to give to any aspiring artist is “to keep going”.
As the local landscape is a recurring theme in her art, I took the opportunity to ask her for the best place for inspiration in London; without hesitation, she told us it was Wandsworth Common.
Although she paints regularly and has begun finding her way into making it a business, she has no intention of giving up her current career as a recruiter of creative directors; her current project, alongside painting, is to get a website up-and-running in order to present her work on an accessible platform.
The only unfortunate thing during our tour is that we didn’t allow enough time to sit down and have a cup of tea with this talented local artist, although if we had, we most likely would have spent all day doing so.