And so the Bristol Artists Book Event is over until the next one in 2015.  The coffee and cakes trolley made its delicious twice-daily rounds and the enormous range of tables laden with books and pamphlets and posters and letterpress and all sorts of other wares provided an even more delectable set of goodies (less fattening, too).  As ever, many old faces and many new, everyone ready to chat - as indeed are the visitors.  I don't know if it's always been thus, but a number of exhibitors were in exactly the same place as they were two years ago - handy, if those were just the tables you intended to visit. 

The weather played very nice on the saturday and on the way back to my parents I was delighted to see a flock (or maybe, like goldfinches, that should be a charm?) of hot air balloons making their serene way above the landscape.  I've intended for years to attend Bristol's Balloon Fiesta, but I never have and I'm almost (though not quite) sure I never will.  A little clutch like that, floating calmly through the evening blue, makes it feel less important.  Even better, I passed a field with a balloon looking ready to launch.  I have never seen that before and I was oh so tempted to park up on the verge to wait and watch.  However, a sensible if spoilsport part of my mind suggested that it might take ten minutes or it might take two hours for all I could tell, so sadly I passed up the opportunity.  Another time, maybe?  You never know.

And that's the end of a little stretch of busy-ness, with two print exhibitions now finished and Leeds and Bristol book fairs over.  However, the next book fair is already on the horizon - a new one, at the Baltic in mid-June.  Gemma and I are sharing a table for that one - it should be fun.   

BABE.  It's very nearly here, and so that eight month stretch that was going to produce such wonderful new work is almost at an end.  Have I produced wonders?  Er, no.  I have at least managed some new work between then and now, but nothing well planned and complex and slowly, lovingly executed.  Whatever did I expect?  And have I got a ton of stock so that I can spend the next few days in relaxed expectation?  That too would be a no.  Again, what on earth did I expect.  Nevertheless, it'll be an excellent weekend with tons of book arts to see (and acquire).  Come visit.

 

I visited Preston this week, mostly to see the print exhibition Impressit at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery.  It came highly recommended by a member of Hot Bed Press and it was a good call.

Ten printmakers are involved, all of whom apparently have links of some kind with UCLan.  Three rooms are given over to the show, the third being shared with older prints that presumably belong to the art gallery's collection.  Of course, some pleased me more than others but that's only to be expected - I don't expect others necessarily to agree.  

I had come across Katherine Jones's work just about everywhere except for real, until the recent exhibition at Lime Gallery, Settle, which included some of her pieces.  The glow of light from her prints has always attracted but I found the Settle prints obscurely disappointing.  I couldn't quite say why - it could have been that they had all become a little too familar (as I said, everywhere) but I think it was also that, right up close, they didn't seem quite as, as perfect as I had been anticipating.  It was just a thing, a little sad and surprising, but we all accept these small betrayals of expectation.  However, for whatever reason, I didn't have the same reaction at the Preston show.  Certainly they were bigger prints which maybe automatically makes you step further back - and at Settle I did realise that taking a step back helped - but even close they retained their glowing magic and floatiness.  Had my level of expectation changed?  I don't know what it was, but they looked really good.   

Even more, I liked her bookarts work 'Bubble High'.    

.

A number of these books were hung from the ceiling - a flock (see the wing in the middle) or maybe a shoal of something prehistoric or deep underwater?  They each have a central cord to pull - the lowest hanging invitingly within reach - to make the wings (fins?) flap, and together they form a very atmospheric, slightly mysterious little group that I really wanted to see emerging from sea mist. Each page has words along its edge - it was hard to make out much, but the theme seemed to be 'of the sea'.  Perhaps my favourite work there.

I really like Anne Desmet's work, not withstanding all my wood engraving reservations, and was completely engaged by her excellent exhibition at the Whitworth (good grief - was that really 2008?) but I felt her prints here did not show up to advantage.  The wrong sort of space?  The wrong sort of company?  Or it could have been laziness on my part, I know.  Whatever, I just found myself wandering past thinking 'Anne Desmet' and moving on. 

Jason Hicklin's works were, I suppose, exactly what you might expect - soft, moody, atmospheric seascapes - but beautiful works.  I was aware of him and what his prints would be like, even without having seen any before.  He was showing a set of prints made for the Cill Rialaig project  - an attempt to resurrect a pre-famine village in southwest Ireland.

What else was there?  I liked Pete Clarke's large letterpress posters built around T S Eliot's 'The Wasteland; I was fascinated by  Wuon-Gean Ho's Dancing Dresses and Shift; Roohi Ahmed's three 'In Visibility' prints, were excellent - they started from Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and developed it; I loved Bren Unwin's pieces.  Must find out more.  

A second, smaller exhibition was Simon Plum's on the stairway walls, Down the Garden Path - drawings and etchings of quirky, humorous images that could almost have been excellent children's book illustrations except probably not all quite for children.  I particularly liked Bear entering Shed.  

I had half, no, three-quarters planned to have a look at John Piper's mountain landscapes at the Whitworth, slotting it into the first open hour on saturday, before attending a mezzotint course with Justin Sanders at Hot Bed Press for the rest of the weekend (excellent, by the way, though I don't think I'll be mastering the technique any time soon...) but inevitably I ran out of time, and now the show is over.  As ever, Could Do Better.   

Thanks to Notes to the Milkman, I went to have a look today at Gerry Halpin's solo exhibition Vantage Point, the current show at The Gallery at St George's House.  This time I found the whole screen set-up less distracting, when I knew that around every corner was the same artist - in fact I even quite liked it as a sort of voyage of discovery, but I might at some point in the future deny that I ever thought that, because I still find it unnervingly un-gallery-like (which might, I suppose, be the point?).

The pictures, I liked.  The premise was quite simple - landscapes viewed from the air, and necessarily quite impressionistic due to the restrictions of time available over any given patch.  Some of the images were hauntingly familiar, such as Night Landing 1 - a sprinkling of lights across a deep blue background, like looking down on stars from above - while others felt more abstracted, without any knowledge to anchor them.  I read the artist's statement and don't remember if there was any mention of whether the landscapes were 'real' or more imaginatively constructed, but in front of several of the works I found myself longing for reference points - even a country would be a start.

The artist says 'My particular visual interest is in looking at places where different geological features meet, expecially where the sea confronts the land', and I did particularly like Breakers II and Coastal Edge.  But then I also particularly liked Strata (though it was one of the pieces I didn't quite get), Crimson Flow and maybe most of all Winter Landscape II.  Colour was everywhere and mostly it was fantastic.  I was intrigued by the little collections of tiny gold boxes next to the artist's signature on many of the paintings.  Maybe there was a system to them, a code?

I couldn't  find any of the pics from the exhibition, but the one below gives you a very good flavour, and you can always look at more at the Gallery or on Gerry Halpin's website.