Some of the best things in an artist’s year arrive in the post. This one arrived as a small blank postcard — and went back out again as a painting of Bristol Cathedral.
Earlier this year, Winsor & Newton launched Art Mail, a global community project with a lovely, old-fashioned premise: paint a postcard, put it in the post, and let it join thousands of others from artists all over the world. No gallery submission portal, no portfolio review. Just a piece of card, some watercolour, and a stamp.
I couldn’t resist. And I’m so glad I didn’t, because my postcard is now live in the Art Mail online gallery:
👉 View “Bristol Cathedral” in the Art Mail Gallery
Why Bristol Cathedral
I had a whole list of ideas — florals, one of the pets I usually paint, something from the coast. But the moment I sat down with the blank card, I knew what it had to be.
Bristol has been home for years. It’s where my studio grew, where so much of my commissioned work was painted, and where our family life happened. Painting the Cathedral wasn’t really a choice about composition or subject matter. It was a small, quiet thank-you letter to a city — and the fact that the piece would literally be posted somewhere else made that feel exactly right.
There’s something about the scale of a postcard that strips a subject back to its essentials. You can’t paint every window, every buttress, every bit of Gothic detail. You have to decide what the building actually feels like and paint that instead. Stone, light, height, weather. That’s it.
What I used
For anyone curious about the materials — the gallery lists them, but here’s the full picture:
- Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolour paints
- Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brush for the fine architectural work
- A Professional watercolour brush for the broader washes
- Drawing inks for the darkest accents and linework
The inks were the deciding factor, honestly. Watercolour alone gave me the soft weathering of the stone, but the Cathedral needed something with more bite in the shadows and the window tracery. A little ink at the end brought the whole thing into focus.
Working small is harder than working big
I paint a lot of detailed commissioned work, so you’d think a postcard would be a relief. It isn’t. A small surface is unforgiving — there’s no room to correct, no space to hide a hesitant edge, and watercolour dries faster on a piece of card than on a full sheet. You get one confident pass and that’s usually your lot.
But that’s also why it was such a good exercise. It forced decisions. I’d recommend it to any painter who feels stuck in over-working things: give yourself a postcard and a deadline and see what happens.
Where the postcards are going
Art Mail has gathered thousands of painted postcards from artists in more than 40 countries. Beyond the online gallery, Winsor & Newton are staging curated physical exhibitions — Saatchi Gallery in London (1–11 October 2026) and Drawing Room in Brooklyn (21 October – 4 November 2026) — and selected postcards will be auctioned afterwards in support of Hospital Rooms, a mental health charity that brings art into NHS mental health units.
That last part matters to me more than the gallery listing does. Thousands of small paintings, made by strangers who will never meet, ending up doing something useful. That’s a good outcome for a piece of card and a stamp.
Take a look
If you’d like to see it, “Bristol Cathedral” is here in the Art Mail gallery — and do spend a few minutes scrolling through the rest of the collection while you’re there. Birds, botanicals, skylines, pets, abstracts, whole continents’ worth of small paintings. It’s a genuinely joyful thing to browse.
Thank you, as always, for following along.
— Klaudia