This ‘Trail’ is a great way to ease your way into the annual Open Houses Art festival that sprung up in Brighton 41 years ago and now fills Brighton, Hove, Kempton, Saltdean, Ditchling and beyond. The beauty of the Ditchling ‘Trail’ is that is generally easy to park in the Village Hall car park then walk in and out of shops and galleries on the High Street, in and through a number of back gardens to a number of studios and workshops, and of course, around the Village Hall itself which hosts a dozen artists and craft makers. 

Entering the Village Hall visitors are invited to complete a slip of paper identifying their favourite. I chose Chris Dawson, a cartoonist – for his wit and execution. Being someone who does life drawing once a month I enjoyed his cartoon showing a life drawing class in a nudist colony in which the artists are naked while their model is clothed. I also enjoyed Karen Peters, see ‘Home for Christmas’, and David Hobden

A little coordination between neighbours since our last visit, there is now a rabbit-run of connected studios between four or five rear garden studios and lean-to spaces. Collectively they offer garden sculptures, paintings, prints, pots … and bespoke guitars and citterns.

I can’t indulge myself in any way with this but can enjoy how types of sculpture can add so much to a garden experience, complementing the planting and established trees and adding a feature to a corner of the lawn or as a centrepiece. My eye caught the bright daisy paintings. 

Caroline Todd,told us how she began creating a painting a day in January 2020 and kept it up for a year during lockdown, restricting herself to small, landscape Moleskine art pads. She  filled several books on display here. 

It reminded me of exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, I’m thinking of Antony Gormley, featuring many notebooks that chart the thinking he has gone through and how one idea or another comes to fruition. 

Caroline was inspired by a fellow artist who said he had been wedded to the discipline of doing something every day for five or more years. 

Restricted to one location during lockdown she became acutely aware of the changing light through the day and seasons. 

I like the line in her blurb ‘there is always a danger of overworking the image and losing the magic’ – I have a habit of doing this (with paint, not drawings). I also like the discipline of doing something everyday, just as once upon a time I wrote a diary daily, kept a blog – every day; or would play the guitar, or go for a swim – every day. The guitar sits untouched like a wrapped sculpture in the sitting room – never touched: I will teach swimmers but haven’t been in the water myself for at least six years. Life moves on. I keep my fingers tapping, my hand in with a pencil … my mind alert and relieving itself somewhere, somehow.