I'm beginning to realise that the old world, the world pre-covid and pre- a lot of other stuff too, has gone. I'm still adjusting to that. My life remains peripatetic, which (still) has its own set of challenges (not least trying to remember where I am when I wake up), and I'm not getting as much work done as I used to. Which is annoying, but I'm trying to think of it as temporary. Which, I hope, it is!

But I do try to keep my printmaking (etc) life ticking over, so I'm sharing a bookarts table with friend Ciarrai Samson (insta @ciarrai_samson) at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh over the weekend of 14th-15th May. There might possibly be new stock, but I've never been to a scottish fair before, so from that angle all my work is new!    

It's beginning to look as if the world is in this viral event for the long haul - not exactly the news that we want to hear, but what can you do? Events are still being cancelled for this year, or sometimes delayed (in a spirit of hopefulness) until later in the year, and while surely no one can really believe that this will be the new normal - pockets of people existing in bubbles and anxious (reasonably or unreasonably) about all the other pockets of people - this is how things are for the forseeable future. Ok, so spaces are filling up again (I really miss the empty roads) but there's something faintly manic about it, as if we're all feverishly dancing at the end of time. Perhaps I'm edgy because I feel at risk - though with the exception of age, about which I don't think I can do anything, all factors are down to me.

Hot Bed Press is now open, and I'm just about getting the hang of printing again - hooray! The Old Lock Up Gallery is running its Secret Postcard show once more, so I produced a bunch of prints for that, and I've been and gone and editioned one of them, so that feels like some proper progress. Now I need to raise my game and (this has been the call for the longest time) accrue some stock. We'll see.

That the list of things I hoped to do but wasn't sure I would - well, it's taken me till May but at long last I'm just beginning to nibble at the edges of some of them. The garden is still chaotic, but marginally less so; there aren't hundreds of new plates ready to print, but there are a handful (and, I like to think, there will be more). The ironing pile, though, has made no real reduction from mountainous to merely hilly, but I have faith that a time will come when small changes will occur even there.

Printmaking is great (well, it is when it's not driving me to distraction in one of quite a number of ways - never mind), and selling prints (specifically to people I don't know) is great too - it's proof that people out there think my work is worth acquiring for whatever reason. It's also great when people I know want my prints, of course, but a different great.

But it's good too if what I already like to do can, in some small way, help out. Donating art for charity is nothing new - there are auctions, secret postcard sales, fairs where a percentage of any sale goes to charity and so on. The charity is often the organiser of such events, but the Instagram project #oneofmanypostcard dreamt up by John Pedder comes from the artist end of things.

His plan is straightforward - an artist (let's say a printmaker - I think it started with printmakers) produces an edition or series of postcard-sized prints, and offers them up on Instagram (John sets a date for sending them out, giving the project more presence and excitement, and therefore ultimately more effectiveness). For free. Anyone who would like one says Ooo, yes please (until they're all spoken for), and in return is expected to make a donation for what they consider the print is worth, to a charity of their choice - or volunteer or whatever, something that aids a charity. And really that's it. On or around the chosen date, artists post, people receive, and make a donation - a small good thing happens, in this difficult world of ours, and that's a plus. And it's growing all the time, with a lot of excitement generated around the date, feeding into momentum for the next date, and the next. How big will it become?

I acquired a couple of postcards from previous release dates and was determined this last time (February 14th) to join in myself. A bit nervous - what if nobody wants them? - but the two dozen I committed to did go, plus a couple more to make me feel wanted (good grief). I sent them out to the USA and Canada, Germany and the Czech Republic, and all around GB, and already I'm hearing back from people. So many charities getting funds - however much, however little - they might not otherwise have received. Cancer charities, mental health ones, Crisis, funds connected to the Australian bush fires, saving cockatoos, helping the homeless, and doubtless many more. There's no need to say what charities recipients donate to, but I was touched by how many people chose to tell me. When I first decided to join in, I suggested that what the printmakers got out of it was inky fingers and a warm fuzzy feeling. I was right.         

Or, I suppose more accurately, an exhibition, a fair, but still the weather.  

I made time on one of my journeys to stop off at Rabley Drawing Centre, near Marlborough, for an exhibition of work by Emma Stibbon - large prints of various sorts, all of place. Urban, chill, fire all featured but I was mostly left with an impression of ice and darkness - I think that might have been largely down to her colour palette, but perhaps also my favourite works were of northern ice and, well, it's that dark time of year, isn't it. Her mark making is incredible - I found myself homing in on smaller and smaller patches. Rabley Drawing Centre feels as if it's in the middle of nowhere, up a narrow road and then down a track to the gentlest of chalk settings in the midst of fields. Its main disadvantage (if we forget about trying to find our way out in an impossible direction) is having to pass through Marlborough on the way there - charming, but regularly grid-locked. The only plus is the sense of achievement in reaching your destination at all!  However, it's always been worth it, and no doubt I'll go on braving the crawling traffic to get there. 

This last Sunday was the Hot Bed Press Christmas print and artists book Fair, held in the large but chilly downstairs of the building. It's taken me a long while to realise that I really enjoy selling at fairs - the chatting to people about the work, the weather, the traffic, the cold - whatever, really. I think of myself as someone who would rather shut myself away on my own, and, yes, sometimes that's true, but it would appear that inbetween such times I like to talk. It's never too late for a bit of insight, I guess. The music I'd hoped for didn't materialise, but there was a lovely christmas tree to compensate, and outside a stylish new board for the workshop, painted by Raul Gutierrez.

As for the weather, well for the last umpteen days it's been frosty with gin-clear skies. Stunning.

Every time I write in here, I say the same things - my, hasn't it been a long time since I last posted; I'm still driving up and down the country on a far too regular basis; I've missed a few more exhibitions. Alas, I say the same things because, broadly, everything is the same. I'm driving up and down the country even more frequently, but things are different only in a matter of degree. So please bear with me, because I expect I'll be saying the same thing in the next, no doubt distant, post.

However, I've managed a few things within that general framework. I had a piece in the annual Bath Society of Artists open exhibition, and one in Ormskirk's  Chapel Gallery Lancashire Open,

and this last weekend I've had a table at the Hebden Bridge Print Fair, which was very enjoyable (they have an exhibition at the town hall too, on for another fortnight).

I also put some postcards into the Old Lock Up Gallery's annual fundraiser, which always feels worthwhile - and means there's been some printmaking in the mix, I'm relieved to say - and have made a few more patchwork landscape collagraph books, which please me ridiculously. And for now, that's it. I don't know what else might be just beyond the horizon - I'll see how life unfolds.

Logically I suppose there can't be infinite exhibitions to visit, though it can seem like it. I miss so many that I'd like to see, but I manage enough to scratch the itch. Mostly visits rely on propinquity, though I'll make the trek for something I consider that important, if it can be made to fit into life's schedule.  I've managed a handful of shows quite recently, so here's one of them. I'd like to think I'll manage some more, but well, y'know, stuff and thing. We'll see.

Four Hot Bed Press members put on an exhibition at Astley Hall, Chorley - this trip was literally during the last two hours of the show, and onlt turned out not to have been within the very final hour because luckily I'd got the closing times wrong. Oliver Flude, Martin Kochany, Mitch Robinson and Gwilym Hughes were the artists, responding to the building during its winter closure. Four very different artists - though all with a relatively muted pallette - took four very different approaches to the brief, including  watercolours of outdoor activity, digitally manipulated etchings based on historical portraits and reactions to the 'insignificant' within the building. This house more or less counts as on my doorstep yet I hadn't been aware of it.  I wandered round it (see? plenty of time!), saw its amazing wonky windows, its four-poster beds, discreet staircases and the like, and found myself formulating how I might have responded to the hall. Differently again, no doubt. An interesting trip on all sorts of fronts - the exhibition, the house, the gardens.