Sunny days in autumn mean constantly being soaked in colour - I'm not complaining, it's glorious, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.  The low sun enriches everything it touches.  I'm not just talking glossy marmalade leaves caught on spiky, bare-branched hedges - a dark and dusty backdrop designed to show any colour of leaf off to advantage - or the lemon-butter coins adorning languid silver birches, or brilliantly sunshine gold trees set preposterously against others of wine-dark red (who needs New England?).  What about the sky?  As often as not it's so dense with textured shades of lilac and lavender, dove and gunmetal, that it looks as touchable as the land beneath it. It's all so intense, so unsubtle.  Buildings are the same - red brick zings; green glass shouts of the sea.  I drive back from my studio past constructions blazing with copper and rust, and at the right angle even the charcoal of the tarmac has more depth than is reasonable.  It's insane. 

It's mostly the sun.  Some autumnal trees contrive to glow like belisha beacons even under the duller kind of grey clouds, but most of the landscape steps back into something softer, something that doesn't thump into my senses.  I'm not sure I could manage quite that intensity all year round, but it's utterly amazing while it lasts, and - maybe it's me - it seems to get more colour-drenched with every passing year.

Anyway, while reeling my way along and trying not to veer off the road, the red brick and green glass caught my eye at least partly because I'd been printing with something like just ten minutes earlier - the fourth and final layer of my print for this year's 20:20 print exchange.  Technically I'm ready a week early, this year, but as I won't be around to print next week, I suppose it's as last minute as ever.        

This time I'm determined to open my studio for the event (though last time I ended up dealing with a minor family crisis at the wrong end of the country, so I've got all my fingers and toes crossed).  I confess in some ways I'd rather not - being on public view isn't terribly high on my list of things to enjoy - but I accept that if there's an open studios event in the building then really our studios should be open.  It's an incentive to tidy, sort, hang work, maybe even (if I find the time) apply a lick of paint here and there, and it's not as if it comes round every month.  I wonder if there'll be another group of folk telling me how they did lino cuts at school.  For the record, I didn't.

It's not my baby any more, and initially I had no intention of exhibiting (as it would require at least a modicum of making), but Claire gently pushed me to share a table and, like a foldy thing (a deckchair, perhaps?), I folded and said yes.  As the Holden Gallery was no longer available for the fair, it took itself under the shade of the Design Manchester umbrella, and last weekend we ended up in the Old Fire Station on London Road along with Manchester Print Fair and a handful of other workshops, food and drink suppliers etc.

The venue was quite something - ornate pillars and tiled walls (including some ?art nouveau tiles), all painted a very improbable blue but with enough peeling areas to hint at what's underneath, and a floor of various paving arrangements presumably indicating the usage of the areas.  Chilly, too - one of those places where you venture outside to get warm - and there was always the possibility that one of the pigeons that flew in from time to time might decorate the artists' books at our end and/or (they are notoriously generous in some regards) the prints at the other end.  As far as I'm aware it didn't happen - surely we'd have heard the cries of anguish.  A triangular courtyard was host to the food and drink elements, which led to more anxiety at times as the occasional drinker brought in his flexible beer glass and gently bounced along to the music. Again, I don't think there were any actual disasters.

The whole building has been sold, and I heard various stories as to what it's going to be, but I'm happy enough to wait and see.  It would be nice to think that the book fair et al might get another chance to be there next year, though thicker socks might be in order.