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Wales in all weather

25/3/2015

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I knew it was a foolish enterprise before I set out.  An hour and more into the trip, I really knew it was foolish.  But by the end of the day I had seen a great exhibition in a lovely gallery, and such glorious scenery in so much colour that, inspite of traffic and weather and time, I couldn't regret it.

I decided that my vague notion of going to see Ian Phillips' exhibition of linocuts at the MOMA gallery in Machynlleth should become a reality.  It was foolish because it was a long way and was going to take a long time (trains were an option, but a lengthier one and with umpteen changes).  It was foolish, too, because in May he will be putting on an exhibition with Laura Boswell at the RK Burt gallery in London, to which I already had and still have every intention of going, and where I imagine a broadly similar body of work might be on show.  I feel it might also have been foolish not to pay enough attention to the forecast and thus not realise that Wales (oh, and England) would throw all sorts of weather at me
on the way out - hail, sleet, rain, proto-snow (you know, those tiny little snowball things) - causing me to wonder briefly whether I might not be making the return trip the same day!  In the end, it was all bluster - it threatened but luckily didn't really deliver.  In fact a return trip lit by the low sun behind me more than made up for all that weather.

The trip out was not great.  There was, as I might have mentioned, the weather.  Concentrating on that led me to make minor navigational errors which added to the time the journey took - as did some extremely cautious drivers (I realise it's not a crime) and an extensive rolling programme of traffic lights for verge-tidying, wall-building, roadworks and the like.  And all the while, that niggling awareness that the return trip would probably take as long and that this hadn't been my cleverest idea.
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At last - after trailing along in another crawling convoy down the final curvy miles - Machynlleth.  No searching for the gallery, there it was immediately.  I loved it - a welcoming, domestic-sized entrance (an old grocery shop, I think?  The history is on the website) leading to a bright, fresh space upstairs (and behind), where the Ian Phillips exhibition was on show.  He mostly does large, reduction linocut landscapes and there was a good display of them.  I was already fascinated by his mark-making, wondering where it came from, why it was there, and he very helpfully provided the necessary info in the introductory panel.  He felt that the gouge marks that are an integral part of producing a lino plate suggested pattern, and that increasingly he wanted there to be pattern in his designs, to which end he took a residency with indigenous artists in Australia.  Their marks, while decorative and intricate in themselves, also contain much cultural information, and he came back keen to build something in a similar vein, incorporating patterns that embodied Welsh symbols.

I knew that the exhibition would include prints produced by the collaborative group Pine Feroda,  This comprises 5 artists, two of whom are Meryl Chesterman (who has an utterly amazing way with water) and Ian Phillips.  The collaborative prints did not disappoint!  A room so light did not lend itself to good photos, but here are some odds and ends.  The image on the left is a small section of a Pine Feroda print, while the rest show a variety of Phillips' mark-making.   

MOMA proved to be extensive, with several more gallery spaces, and I liked the David Nash cork construction in (I think) The Tannery - instantly recognizable as a sibling to his burnt wood structure at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  But time was ticking on and I was aware that I might meet more weather on the return trip and definitely would meet plentiful teatime traffic, so this visit was ridiculously short compared to the time spent getting there and back.  On the way there I had more or less sworn I would never undertake such a trek again - after the gallery, I decided instead that I would just shoehorn much more available time into the next visit.  

As for the journey home, well I was drenched, soaked, drowned in mad, intense colour.  It was overwhelming - exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure.  I would turn a corner and be confronted with a sweep of mountain in old gold and dark blood red on one side, slate blue and burgundy on the other; around another corner, a hill in dusty shades of bramble stain, with a stretch of land in front of it painted in buttercup yellow and burnt orange; one more corner and the same hill was set against brilliantly lit apple green instead.  Everywhere there were winter trees in all the shades of green, as well as ghost white, rusty orange, cherry red and a most improbable pink.  Not blossom but the purpley branches of silver birch, catching the light just so.  It was a sort of miserable relief to reach duller scenery but much safer for driving.  It brings home, though, how much drop-dead gorgeous landscape depends on the perfect lighting system.

And yes the traffic homewards was bad, and yes it all took forever, but it was so so worth it.  Though I didn't do it,  I felt quite equal to the prospect of another foolish trip today.
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Eclipse 

21/3/2015

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It was exciting, it really was, like someone was wringing all the light out of the sun and leaving behind something eerily insubstantial.  I realise it was only partial, here in the north west, but it was so much better than the 1999 damp squib.  This time I could see what all the fuss was about and why you might consider travelling to see the real deal (though only if the odds of it being blocked out by clouds were pretty low). 

I know pictures of the event are everywhere at the moment, but, I don't know, you have to note the occasion somehow.  I'm so glad I saw it.     
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Linocut skill 

20/3/2015

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When I went to the 2014 Printfest in Ulverston, I mentioned that I had a strange problem with much of the work there - the computer images were so very good that often there was a slight disappointment when I came face to face with the Real Thing.  There wasn't enough of an improvement from the copy to the print to draw me in.

With Kevin Holdaway's (mostly) linocut exhibition in Stockport, which I eventually reached this week, days or possibly hours before it closed (of course), things turned out to be reassuringly the other way round.  I had been reluctant to go - not my sort of imagery, all looking rather too photographic and very flat - but decided that it was unfair to do the equivalent of judge the book by its cover (um, though I do do that).  So I went. 

And as I said, the actual prints were a great improvement on the computer images.  Still not many of them my sort of thing, still more photograph-y than not, but no longer flat and very much more interesting than I had expected.  Holdaway's cutting and registration skills are obviously phenomenal (not so very surprising, he's a member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, for which I assume you have to be pretty good) and the amazing intricacy of his work is something I don't associate with linocut.  Message to self - don't be so quick to pre-judge in future.
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BABE next

18/3/2015

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Suddenly suddenly suddenly there seem to be many things needing me to get down to producing work NOW!  Not one of them has turned up suddenly, of course, but I find it enticingly easy to ignore deadlines until I'm just about to trip over them and fall flat on my face.  It really is no good at all, making as it does for regular bouts of sheer panic, but thus far I seem to be incapable of changing my habits.

To be fair to me - and I do always like to be fair to me - two of those deadlines are in July, which is hardly tomorrow, and although in work production terms July feels far too soon, I suppose if I panic now I might even be ready by then.  

Before that, though, comes the excitement of BABE, the Bristol Artists Book Event.  The Arnolfini is in a lovely spot, right on the harbourside, and the fair is always stuffed full with brilliant people and wonderful work.  I'm not without work to adorn a table (phew) but the recent Leeds fair means I could do with some substantial topping up, and already the clock is ticking.  If anyone is in the area in April, do come along and say hello.
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Leeds fair

9/3/2015

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Well, it was good!  I'm never ready (perhaps my better half is right, and I do get something out of the last minute panic and excitement, but I have to say that it doesn't feel that way to me!) and this fair fitted that pattern perfectly.  It left me, at the beginning of day one, suspended between wanting the fair to go well (of course) and not wanting too much to sell because it was ALL out there on the table.  There were no backup supplies, and I like to follow the approach that more is more.  Not to a ridiculous level, but if there were too many spaces, I'd know that was because there was nothing else to fill them with and I'd expect other people to know too.  I finished some books during saturday and during the evening (you see?  This is what it's always like) because it seemed a waste of all that too-late flurry of activity the week before if I then didn't take them to the fair at all. 
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And a little bit of everything sold, which was rather nice, and didn't highlight too much that, quite often, that little bit of everything was actually all of everything, right there and then.  I decided not to rush through the turkish map fold 'books' (they're not books yet) and make shedloads of annoying and irreversible errors - I like to think they'll be ready for BABE in April.

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Poetry and books 

5/3/2015

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I saw oystercatchers twice, last weekend - haven't seen any in years, and then I catch a couple flying over Salford - that certainly surprised me - and another pair in a field in the Pentlands.  They made nicely designed bookends to a weekend in Edinburgh.  We go up most years to watch Scotland play rugby.  I almost said to watch them lose, but that wouldn't be fair and besides isn't wholly the point - we enjoy the trip to Murrayfield anyway, though a win is better still.

We wandered round central Edinburgh on the Saturday morning, and included Rose Street (I don't usually bother - I'm sure I remember it as mostly pubs, and if you're not going to a pub then there doesn't seem much point).  Glad we did - it was filled with poetry!  Planters all the way along, with poems by the likes of Norman MacCaig and Iain Crichton Smith around each one.
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And towards the castle end a series of panels of a George Mackay Brown poem.  All rather lovely.
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Since when I should have been hard at work preparing for the Leeds artists book fair this coming weekend.  Well, I have been, but with an inevitability from which by now I really should have gleaned something, the time was nowhere near as big as the workload, so I'm suffering a certain level of panic.  Shouldn't be spending time writing this, really.  Back to work. 
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    Hi there

    I make prints and book arts, though nowhere near as often as I'd like - no good reason, just an inability to get on with things.  I occasionally go on about landscape (with which I am mildly obsessed) and various of its elements, and I like to pass comment on exhibitions I visit.

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