I think it's probably that it's great to print without too much thought; to cut linos meant for not much more than a couple of days' use; to dig out some wooden letterpress and put it to work; to mess with colour knowing that, if it doesn't work out brilliantly, it doesn't terribly matter.  They're flyers - here today, gone tomorrow - and meanwhile I'm enjoying myself and almost certainly learning a thing or two as I go.  That I really want to get down to using letterpress in general and my wooden letterpress in particular, for instance.

However, enough any old colour, enough 'they'll do for throwaway art'.  I have a handful of posters left to print and then it's time to move on.  Time to rediscover whatever it was I was working on before and to consider whatever it is I should be working on next.  Oh yes, and now I think about it, there are a hundred bookmarks to print.  Ah. 

Beauty is, as might have been mentioned by others from time to time, in the eye of the beholder.  Just been up to London (though not to visit the queen) and taken in the British Museum - sought out the Georg Baselitz exhibition because of the mention of print, took in a tour of the Chinese work next door, and then discovered the Japanese work upstairs purely because I went to look at two pieces of work on the landing half way up.  And there, after being inevitably but briefly delayed by netsuke, I discovered an exhibition of work by Noda Tetsuya, who is (wiki has since informed me) one of the world's pre-eminent printmakers.  Whether that is a universally held view or not, I thought his muted, understated, often domestic prints, a combination of adjusted photo screenprints and woodcuts, were wonderful.  They were all 'diary entries' - apparently the artist has produced over 500 of them in the last 50 years - and gentle, faded images that I just loved.  I didn't give them as much time as I would have liked because, whilst one's other half might claim to be happy sitting somewhere reading a book on his phone, it doesn't feel like quite the thing to leave him there indefinitely.  But I so want to go back and see them again.  And I probably shall - they're there till October, I think, and I'd quite happily make the trek just for them.  

As I said, I didn't spend enough time on the whole show - instead I homed in on a few images that instantly captured my attention.  One was of the artist's wife reading a newspaper - I won't be surprised if I find out it's his best-known image - and another of four overripe peaches sitting on a pillow. 

However, while later expanding my knowledge of Noda Tetsuya (which at that point was, in total, that I had seen these prints), I came across a review of the show puzzled at why room enough for the 22 prints on show would be given to this artist at the museum when there was so much other, so much better Japanese work just at the other end of the room.  I understand the opinion that an exhibition of print might be in an art gallery rather than the British Museum, and I realise that many people will prefer the other end of the room to this one.  But leaving aside those issues completely, instead coming from a printmaking angle and with no particular interest in Japan, I was just delighted to chance upon these prints.      

Lots of people go to London on a regular or irregular basis - from time to time, anyway.  I don't, not really.  Well I suppose I do, but when I say from time to time, I'm thinking of something more than probably half a dozen times max in the last twenty-plus years.  Whenever I do go, I think I should make more trips - all those exhibitions, all those repositories of 'culture' - but another part of me does feel that then London has won.  Why on earth should the rest of Britain be considered, if we're all prepared to visit anyway?  Still, I try to tamp down such sulky, childish notions - nothing's going to change - and anyway this is all by the by.  What this lack of visiting means is that I don't have much in the way of a mental map of London and that I don't apply much thinking to names and what they might mean.  Thus I was pleased but surprised to come across the Bankside Gallery (home of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers), um, on the bank of the Thames and, even more um, next to Bankside Power Station aka Tate Modern.  Oh dear.  Still, it was another source of print delight for the weekend.       

I didn't submit anything for it but now I'm distracted by it anyway, making flyers.  Passes the time, I suppose, and is sort of productive.

Gemma Lacey has, to quote her, "been working on the 5th floor at Islington Mill for 6 weeks now. Sharing the space with the wind, accumulated dusts and a population of butterflies, [...] cutting into and printing with furniture". 

This resulted in 'The Longing Series' and today her work has been on show for those prepared to take on the five flights of stairs (alright, alright, I know it shouldn't be a problem - I wasn't even carrying furniture up there!) - not, in fact, in the vast 5th floor space where she has been working until now, but up one more staircase and into the attic.  The exhibition space, if you will.   A lovely woody, dusty space in shades of moth wing that could have been designed specifically to show off Gemma's prints - a peaceful and somehow intimate haven, with the muted sound of traffic from six floors down and the chatter of Gemma's newest visitors scarcely a floor down, both a world away. 

It was an exhibition of two halves - at the top of the wooden staircase, the 'plates' (or furniture, as such storage and other items are more commonly known) were off to the left and the prints to the right.  Furniture first.  As well as a wardrobe door and a coffee table, the two main pieces of furniture (below) were carved into on three sides with woodcut tools to show images of places the artist would like to be.  Even more than is so often the case with printmaking plates, they were beautiful things in their own right.  I could imagine people delighted to own such a unique - and of course entirely useful - piece of art.     

At the other end of the attic, the prints from these pieces of furniture were on softly fluttering, suspended lengths of lightweight fabric, and they were special.

Whatever ink Gemma used, it has resulted in a warm yet chalky charcoal shade (and how she has printed them so amazingly well is beyond me).  I'm not sure why, but it seems inevitable that these veil-like hanging prints have a japanese feel to them.  I found myself reminded of Arturo di Stefano's paintings of fabric, too.

I said at the time that I thought there was a feeling of sadness and loneliness, but I now realise that the tone of that was entirely wrong - what I should have said was wistfulness and solitude.  For a short while I had the floor entirely to myself - I could have stayed there like that for the whole afternoon, feeling utterly calm and at peace with the world.  Everything there worked so well together - I feel privileged to have seen the show.  Thank you, Gemma - though a few butterflies would have made for absolute perfection...

So I trailed across to Sheffield at the weekend to see its print fair, being held in the Millennium Galleries - which, probably not so very coincidentally, is showing an exhibition of work by local contemporary printmakers at the moment (inevitably there was considerable overlap with the fair).  I looked round that too, while I was there, but have inconveniently forgotten names I wanted to mention (not everyone was at the fair).  Never mind, though - I'd like to see the wood engraving exhibition at the Graves Gallery, which I wrongly decided was shut on saturdays and so didn't even attempt to search out (yup, usual excellent prep), and on my short visit this weekend I don't feel I saw enough of Sheffield so I shall have to make a return trip before very long.  It's odd - I feel sure I've been to the centre before yet I have no memory of it at all except some vague recollection that I didn't have time to see ... something.  My life increasingly feels like this - I have no expectation of a brightly alert old age.    

The fair was rather good - an entirely different set up from Ulverston's Printfest, where artists mostly had screens and no tables unless (I assume) they brought their own.  Here it was more like the set up for a book fair, with a table as the basic unit for nearly all of the exhibitors.  Although I knew a small number of people there, including the lovely Jane Elliot, aka Leaf City Press, a co-founder of Sheffield Print Club and a part of the gang who made this fair happen,

the majority of the printmakers were new to me.  I didn't do a count but I felt that most of the printmaking there involved silkscreens, though by no means all.  It was a good spread, with etching, letterpress, relief and digital as well, not to mention textiles, artists' books and some fun geometric print constructs, the latter from the Common Press (not because it is common but because it's on a Common - alas I have completely forgotten where, except that it was a village in Derbyshire).  For photos of the fair itself, there's a good selection of photos by Simon Day here.

Some favourite prints were relief ones from Helen Roddie.  Much of her work is around the theme of verge and hedgerow, so within spitting distance of Angie Lewin's work, but I definitely prefer these - they seem so very much more rooted in the earth.  I suppose they are quite stylized but I really like that, and they manage to remind me of Albrecht Dürer - what could possibly be bad about that!

Why I would never make a good critic parts 1-4.

One.  I don't really like saying nasty (even constructively nasty) things about specific work - there's (nearly) always something to like for some reason or other.  Ok, sometimes a very small something, but it's someone's artistic endeavour and I don't know that anyone should be discouraged too much.  Besides which I don't feel that I have the right.

Two.  Or the knowledge.  It's generally seen as a mark of ignorance to say anything along the lines of 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like', but broadly that's always been my approach (go on, say it, so I'm ignorant).  Yes, I can see consummate skills and still not like where the work ends up, but if I like something I'm liable to be far less critical.  Not a terribly objective observer.

Three.  As I've mentioned before, I don't always pay sufficient attention.  If something doesn't grab me, I don't necessarily look at all, and thereby miss a lot of quiet beauties and slow burners, I'm absolutely sure.

Four.  I change my mind a lot.  Which is where this chain of thought began.  Having flipped my way through it a number of times since Saturday, I'm staring at the Printfest exhibition catalogue

and realising that what I really need is a return visit.  Preferably in a slower, emptier hall and without a tedious drive behind me and another one ahead of me.  I'm pretty sure that in the end I went round everyone but equally I know I dismissed quite a lot of the work without due attention, and looking through the catalogue makes me wonder just how many other prints, if I saw them again, would wow me.  However, I think the point is that it almost certainly needs to be a second visit, not just a better first visit, and that was never going to happen for the printfest.  But I'll bear all of this in mind next year.

I've never been before - it's always seemed such a very long way, somehow further than the Cumbrian potfests (I'm not entirely sure but I think it has something to do with it not being in a relatively straight line - turning left at junction 36 and heading in a sunset direction somehow stretches the distance in my mind).  But I went today and enjoyed it.  Numbering such observations as I made ... 

First.  I made my way round the whole of the room, talking to no one (I wasn't in the mood - that's a wholly irrelevant story) and taking a reasonably good look at the nicely varied art.  It split into a number of categories - meh (that was quite a lot of it - a matter of personal taste on the whole, you can't like everything); I can see it's very good but I don't really go for it; very good and I do pretty much like it but not necessarily on my wall; very good and I do pretty much like it and I would have it on my wall by choice.  The last three categories were much smaller than the first and the final one smallest of all.  I continue to be fascinated by pricing - it seems wildly erratic, but no doubt boils down to what the artist knows they can charge and still sell?  Also by (greetings) cards - some artists had many designs, some a few, quite a number of people had no cards - maybe they haven't thought that way yet, maybe the commercial transaction isn't the point to them, or I have before now come across artists who feel that to duplicate their work on a card somehow dilutes their art and makes it less valuable.  I have no opinions, I'm just fascinated.

Second.  I went round again, in a better state of mind by now and no longer actively avoiding interaction.  I found a whole section I'd missed in the middle of the room - I had become so aware that I could easily miss people at the edges that halfway round the first time, I moved to the borders of the room and didn't move back.  The room was reasonably busy and quite complicated with criss-crossing panels, but inspite of the risk of missing artists it was pleasant to navigate.  Sometimes massed art presented in these sorts of circumstances can be soul-destroying, though I have never pinned down why it has that effect on me. On my second trip I liked more work than on my initial tour - does more cheerful equal less critical?  I've actually asked myself that plenty of times down the years, but I don't know the answer, don't know if one set of judgements is more or less fair than the other, and do know that it really doesn't matter to anyone but me.

Third.  I did my homework before I went, looked at what the work at the show was going to be like and which printmakers' work I was looking forward to seeing.  But (oh dear) these days reproduction is so good on the computer, that in many cases seeing the real thing doesn't necessarily add anything much, if at all.  I suppose it should make no odds - if the work was good on the screen and is good in real life, what does it matter that it isn't actively better?  But it still manages to leave a faint sense of disappointment, however unfair.  Oh well, some of the work I liked better than I expected so perhaps it all balances out.

Whose work did I like?  Well there was Laura Boswell's linocuts and japanese woodcuts - I've mentioned her before. 

And Anja Percival's light-filled prints - I've mentioned her too, though never seen her work for real before (except in the 20:20).

And Flora McLachlan - again, I've liked her prints without seeing them for real until now (though she might have been in the 20:20 too).  Then there was Henrietta Corbett (wow!), Janet Dickson and Debby Mason (in particular her mezzotint dodo).  I also liked Kevin Maddison's illustrative prints and Jane Walker's lovely colours (she shows at Rostra too).  

There were more good prints but they were scattered hither and yon - these are the printmakers I remember best. 

After that I wandered round Ulverston for a while, enjoying the many arches with rooms over (that always appeals) and tantalising glimpses of what lay beyond.  Maybe not much, for all I know, but it's the hint, the half-promise, that's so attractive.  There were flags/banners everywhere in the town - didn't investigate why, maybe it's always like that.  Certainly colourful, and sort of festive.  I found a lovely wool shop (Loopy) and a proper bookshop (Sutton's).  By proper, I mean one with lots of little rooms and corners, and heaps and boxes of new and old books everywhere, and steep staircases to other floors.  A feeling that the whole enterprise is living, breathing.  You know, a proper bookshop.