GPC Affordable Art Fair

Gloucestershire Print Co-operative has its very own Affordable Art Fair in full swing in our dedicated gallery space at Griffin Mill, Stroud.

There is a lovely variety of work available all under £100, much of it well under!

If you are coming along to look, please note that it is only officially open on Saturdays.
See you soon!

RWA 161st Open Exhibition

Yesterday I was thrilled to be able to go down to the RWA to see one of my prints, 'Weather beaten track' included in this year's annual open exhibition.

Its fascinating to see which images are selected for shows like this. For some people this was the less obvious choice of the images I submitted, but it is the one that is looser in the drawing and handling of resists - therefore more adventurous for an etching? Perhaps this is what the selectors saw in it.

The print/drawing room had a lot of good quality work by some of my favourites of this show, including Fiona Robinson, Ros Ford and Laurie Steen and I felt honoured to be hanging right next to David Carpanini's atmospheric etchings inspired by Welsh villages.

Etchings by David Carpanini - beautiful sooty blacks

It was also good to see lots of representatives of UWE's MA Print course, and of the Gloucestershire Printmaking Co-op.

Its a good show, worth a visit if you're in the Bristol area.

Charcoal drawing - May Path

I've been making a few large scale sketches to work out images that have possibilities for etching.

This is the most recent image to be transferred into etching, drawn from sketchbook studies and photos taken back in May when the new growth was starting to fill out and when the sun was quite high.

By late summer it became almost impossible to make out the floor of this path, so I had to revert to photos to finish the drawing.


adaptions to the foreground and shadows 

There's a lot of new work underway at the moment for the exhibition at New Brewery Arts in January, but not a lot finished... back to the drawing board for me then.

Charcoal drawing - viewpoint

I wondered if a different viewpoint would produce an interesting piece.

 



I noticed this minor path made by animals when I was doing a photographic recce at the end of the summer. The scale of the leaves and the dark leading to the light intrigued me.
The drawing challenged me, and there was more interpretation on the drawing board than I expected.

This earlier stage shows how the tonal balance and shaping changed as the drawing progressed. The process of bringing a drawing from the paper continues to be both challenging and endlessly fascinating.

Inspiration

Inspiration comes from a variety of sources - reading is a lovely supplement to the visual.
I received these two books as a birthday present, and have enjoyed thumbing through them over the summer.

 

Holloway is a treasure of a book, not least because of Stanley Donwood's beautiful drawings.

 

The Old Ways is full of Robert Macfarlane's beautiful prose describing his walking adventures and musings.

 

" Ahead of me lay more days on foot, and the path insinuating eastwards - in the old and innocent sense of the verb, from the Latin insinuare, 'to bend in subtle windings, to curve'."

Robert Macfarlane



Inside my sketchbook - free to invent

Over the summer I have revisited places that I know really well and I have drawn and redrawn them a number of times. Sometimes this is quite meditative, its usually relaxing, and often provides surprisingly varied results.

 By standing in a different place, or drawing at a different time of the day the place can appear quite different.

Taking a different starting point or looking at the place with a different focus can also lead to an interesting drawing.

I had pondered on this process, and then heard a talk given at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath on Henry Moore. The speaker quoted Moore:

"The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows him to try out all kinds of formal ideas - things that he doesn't yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with ... within the subject that you've done a dozen times before you are free to invent a completely new form or idea."

 

What a wonderful justification, and how true. I can now enjoy going back to certain places time after time knowing that when I am there I am 'free to invent'

Weather beaten track

I've been working on keeping things loose as the scale of the print develops. Working from photographs can impose too much detail, so this print is made by working only from sketches completed on location.

There's something immensely satisfying in seeing a number of prints lined up

 - the magic of multiples 

 

'Weather beaten track' etching 40 x 20cm

 

I made my sketches of this track back in March when the weather was changeable. This section is quite exposed and I got hailed on one day as I sat there, and then caught a snow flurry the next time I drew. It was always late in the day as I took the dog for his afternoon walk and it seemed a bleak place. Hence the blackness of the trees in the distance, the rough bare track and the title of the etching.