The opening for Hot from the Press was a quiet affair, which I felt was rather a shame for Emma Kelly, the curator of The Gallery at St George's House, after all the effort she put in.  However, lovely people we knew turned up, and I thought that was very generous of them, and Katy Hollinshead (another of the exhibitors) pulled exactly the same trick as she had done in our recent London exhibition, which was to sell on the opening day!  Good for her!

Anyway, thank you very much to Emma for all her hard work making us look so shiny.  It's a good do, our exhibition, even if I say so as shouldn't, and I hope lots of people take the opportunity to go and admire the work of five very different printmakers.  

I reached home to find a chunky little package from Bristol had arrived - my collection of bookmarks from the annual UWE exchange. They're always enormous fun, though when I got to my own representative one I realised that I had neither signed nor numbered them.  Oops - sorry Sarah.  Here are some, but nowhere near all, of them.

With Sunday came (the third and final day of) Potfest in the Park, a feast of ceramics at Hutton-in-the-Forest, north of Penrith.  Rain was promised for later, so I started reasonably early and was pleased to do the rounds before a persistent drizzle settled in.
As usual, amazing pottery wherever I looked.  One of the few things that maturity has delivered to me, though, is enough sense to realise that there really is nowhere at home for big or delicate pieces, and anything I get at the moment has either to serve a purpose or be able to be hung on the wall. So with that knowledge hanging around in the back of my mind, I ended up with a couple of delightful little beakers (Michelle Young-Hares) and a wall plaque (Andrew Adair), and plans for next year.  Well done me, since I was unlikely to come home with nothing.

I took pics of a representative group of favourites.  It's always a little tricky, because what the exhibitors really want, of course, is that I should buy something (which is exactly what I would want if I were them), but they're all very decent about it if I ask to take photos.

After that, I went off tree-searching (for prints) on a circuitous route home.  Not entirely successful, as a tree search - the rain was not a plus for that - but very beautiful, and at least in part because of the rain.  Hills were a subtle, misty background, and of course wild and lonely and all you might expect of Cumbrian hills on the edge of the Lake District; everything else seemed to be designed in muted sweeps of watercolour - a wash of pink here, for rosebay willowherb; a soft patch of pink-tinged creams there to represent hogweed; brushstrokes loaded with blues for the geraniums; something a little choppier in greys to suggest rocks.  A splatter of sunshine yellow and wine red and rich clotted cream for other flowers dotted about.  A startlingly lemon green amongst the gentler greens for recently-mown fields.  And plenty of villages built in the faintly reddish stone of the area, where all the buildings looking built to withstand the worst winter can throw at them ('we'll be fine holed up here till spring comes').  Very soothing and exhilarating all at once.  I'll collect trees another day. 

It was sublime.  Short, but repeated throughout the day; I stayed for four performances before I dragged myself away, but I think I would quite happily have stayed until the gallery closed.  The choir members were intermingled with whoever was in the gallery, so that we were totally immersed in the music, with different singers striking up at different times and from different directions, each new nearby voice sending a thrill through the listener (I can't have been the only one to feel that way).  It's impossible to describe the moving beauty of it, and because the choir wandered about inbetween, each performance was entirely different.  I went away with the music playing round and round in my head, and I was slightly bereft when I realised, later on, that it had faded from my memory.  I've always really liked Arvo Part, but this was something very special.

London.  I suppose it was all about PRINT, our own exhibition with thirteen of us from Hot Bed Press showing at the RKB Gallery.  That, too, has now been and gone, but I think we had a pretty good time, and it gave us plenty of opportunity to learn how we might do things better another time.  And we sold a good handful of work, which was very gratifying. 

I saw more of London in one go than I have done since I was there on courses for four weeks when I first started work, and on the whole (allowing for the low-level unpleasantness of the tube, and a sore and therefore very tiring leg) I enjoyed it. You get into the rhythm of it, don't you - I ought to go back sooner rather than later, before it all starts to seem too much all over again.

Of course, it would be silly to go all that way and not take at least some advantage of the utter landslide of art on offer only in London.  Inevitably I missed much - for instance, the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Tate Modern, which has come with rave reviews from everyone who's been - but I decided to make my first ever visit to a Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

It was truly enjoyable.  Too much for one visit, really (when your leg hurts, moan moan) but I soldiered on (and even went up to see the Joseph Cornell exhibition upstairs).  Like the annual Bath Society of Artists show, everything is cheek by jowl, and just sometimes it seemed terribly cramped, pinched even, but much of the rest of the time it was glorious.  With so much art and so much wall to work with, they could do inventively shaped hanging, such as a right angle triangle of pieces here, or a column of smaller works next to an enormous one there, and have such playfulness shown off to advantage by the amount of space still around. 

I liked the William Kentridge room (somewhere worth far more attention than I gave it) and the panel of Norman Ackroyd miniatures (as well as his other works); I inevitably gave plenty of attention to the two print rooms, but all sorts of original prints were scattered everywhere.  Here's a little selection from my favourites:

Then there was the hanging piece 'Applied Project Rig' (Liam Gillick) in the Wohl Central Hall (because it looked so good against the dome), and the incredible 'Erebus (man on Fire version II)' (Tim Shaw) in the sculpture room, and all the intricate models in the architecture room, and the overwhelming collection of pages from Tom Phillips' 'A Humument' that for whatever reason made me want to read the original book, A Human Document.  Or at least start it.  And so very many other pieces of work. 

I chose a favourite piece, by Ian McKeever, quite early on in my tour of the exhibition, and in that pink room of all places.  While I would be reluctant to call anything The favourite, it definitely remains up there, and it's not even a print!  I tried to capture the marks in those rich burgundy areas too, but they came out improbably pink in the photo, which did them no justice. 

After that, Joseph Cornell.  Too much in one day, though, I think, and I rather rushed round - I'm glad I went, but I can't say I retained much of what I saw.  Instead I derived pleasure from the stairwell, and later from the lights in the Grand Cafe, and then I sat in St James' Park, eating icecream and spotting green parakeets - an excellent way to wind down.

As a general rule I lead a relatively idle life.  There are not that many occasions when I have to be anywhere at a certain time, do anything by a certain date.  So the last umpteen weeks have left me feeling somewhat put-upon.  Quite unreasonable of me, I know - I opted into most, if not all, of the things that have caused me to adjust my habitual sloth. 

One of the side effects of all this doing has been that I've never quite married time with inclination to talk about exhibitions and the like.  Well, there is now an easing off of pressure, and a slight feeling that I might at last be catching up with myself.  However, I can't do that all in one shot!  I'll go by location.

First, and far too late, a couple of long-finished Bath exhibitions.  The Bath Society of Artists' Annual show closed more than three weeks ago, now.  I declare an interest - I had a print in the exhibition, and it's still a thrill to see my work on a gallery wall - but I really enjoy open exhibitions.  I know a lot of people object to so much stuffed in, everything hugger-mugger with scarcely room to breathe, but I like it.  It's bright, cheerful, the viewer has no idea what will be next.  There again, I like bunting, and my christmas tree is bazaar-like, not themed. 

My parents saw the show before I did and delivered their (different) verdicts, one of which was that it wasn't as good as last year.  Perhaps inevitably, therefore, I entered expecting less, which (just as inevitably) it delivered.  Except it didn't really.  The more I looked, the more I saw, the more I liked (to my taste, obviously, not necessarily to my parents'), so why that initial impression?  I wondered if it was lack of big works, that draw the eye in, and decided it was, before realising that actually there were big works.  So I don't know what the first impressions were all about, except that they were unfair, and in fact on a return visit my parents decided the show was far better than they had thought on their initial trip, so it wasn't all down to a difference in artistic tastes.

I'm always drawn to original prints - though not exclusively - and was almost bound to like a collagraph by Amanda Ralfe, whose work I already admire enormously.  She manages to translate the essence of the Wiltshire downs into deceptively simple landscapes, and I love them.  Taking photos at open shows, however, is rather a nightmare - my arms aren't long enough for the high work, and at the best of times all my photos are on the skew, so please don't look for a quality picture! 

Other works that I thought were great included 'Herbarium' by Jennie Gilling (would love to identify all the herbs), 'Self-Portrait; Falling off a Horse Sideways' by Richard Twose (isn't this fantastic!) and 'Peace - Venice' by Will Vaughan (those Italian tiles are addictive).  You can probably guess which pictures I didn't take.  But four or so weeks is a very long time in Memory, it turns out, so that I can remember far less that I want to.  Shame.

In the smaller gallery on the way in, the Bath Society of Artists had a display of postcard-sized art by its members, up for raffle for charity - it's an appealing format, I always think, where you also have the enjoyable pastime of spot-the-artist, and I would happily have gone home with a number of them, but alas when the draw was made my numbers didn't come up.

The annual exhibition was at the city's Victoria Art Gallery, but the second show I visited was at a much smaller venue.  The blessing and the curse of twitter is that there is just so much out there - one of the places I've come across is the Quercus Gallery (Bath is, I think, probably stuffed with a thousand little galleries, but first you have to spot them, and I do often walk around in a world of my own, and second they have to draw you in - in this case twitter helped me skip both those stages).