Or, I suppose more accurately, an exhibition, a fair, but still the weather.  

I made time on one of my journeys to stop off at Rabley Drawing Centre, near Marlborough, for an exhibition of work by Emma Stibbon - large prints of various sorts, all of place. Urban, chill, fire all featured but I was mostly left with an impression of ice and darkness - I think that might have been largely down to her colour palette, but perhaps also my favourite works were of northern ice and, well, it's that dark time of year, isn't it. Her mark making is incredible - I found myself homing in on smaller and smaller patches. Rabley Drawing Centre feels as if it's in the middle of nowhere, up a narrow road and then down a track to the gentlest of chalk settings in the midst of fields. Its main disadvantage (if we forget about trying to find our way out in an impossible direction) is having to pass through Marlborough on the way there - charming, but regularly grid-locked. The only plus is the sense of achievement in reaching your destination at all!  However, it's always been worth it, and no doubt I'll go on braving the crawling traffic to get there. 

This last Sunday was the Hot Bed Press Christmas print and artists book Fair, held in the large but chilly downstairs of the building. It's taken me a long while to realise that I really enjoy selling at fairs - the chatting to people about the work, the weather, the traffic, the cold - whatever, really. I think of myself as someone who would rather shut myself away on my own, and, yes, sometimes that's true, but it would appear that inbetween such times I like to talk. It's never too late for a bit of insight, I guess. The music I'd hoped for didn't materialise, but there was a lovely christmas tree to compensate, and outside a stylish new board for the workshop, painted by Raul Gutierrez.

As for the weather, well for the last umpteen days it's been frosty with gin-clear skies. Stunning.

Every time I write in here, I say the same things - my, hasn't it been a long time since I last posted; I'm still driving up and down the country on a far too regular basis; I've missed a few more exhibitions. Alas, I say the same things because, broadly, everything is the same. I'm driving up and down the country even more frequently, but things are different only in a matter of degree. So please bear with me, because I expect I'll be saying the same thing in the next, no doubt distant, post.

However, I've managed a few things within that general framework. I had a piece in the annual Bath Society of Artists open exhibition, and one in Ormskirk's  Chapel Gallery Lancashire Open,

and this last weekend I've had a table at the Hebden Bridge Print Fair, which was very enjoyable (they have an exhibition at the town hall too, on for another fortnight).

I also put some postcards into the Old Lock Up Gallery's annual fundraiser, which always feels worthwhile - and means there's been some printmaking in the mix, I'm relieved to say - and have made a few more patchwork landscape collagraph books, which please me ridiculously. And for now, that's it. I don't know what else might be just beyond the horizon - I'll see how life unfolds.

Logically I suppose there can't be infinite exhibitions to visit, though it can seem like it. I miss so many that I'd like to see, but I manage enough to scratch the itch. Mostly visits rely on propinquity, though I'll make the trek for something I consider that important, if it can be made to fit into life's schedule.  I've managed a handful of shows quite recently, so here's one of them. I'd like to think I'll manage some more, but well, y'know, stuff and thing. We'll see.

Four Hot Bed Press members put on an exhibition at Astley Hall, Chorley - this trip was literally during the last two hours of the show, and onlt turned out not to have been within the very final hour because luckily I'd got the closing times wrong. Oliver Flude, Martin Kochany, Mitch Robinson and Gwilym Hughes were the artists, responding to the building during its winter closure. Four very different artists - though all with a relatively muted pallette - took four very different approaches to the brief, including  watercolours of outdoor activity, digitally manipulated etchings based on historical portraits and reactions to the 'insignificant' within the building. This house more or less counts as on my doorstep yet I hadn't been aware of it.  I wandered round it (see? plenty of time!), saw its amazing wonky windows, its four-poster beds, discreet staircases and the like, and found myself formulating how I might have responded to the hall. Differently again, no doubt. An interesting trip on all sorts of fronts - the exhibition, the house, the gardens.   

Trowbridge's Drawing Projects UK hosts some great content - exhibitions, poetry meetings, classes, talks, and the cafe (Miranda's coffee shop) looks damn fine too - much of which I'm in no position to access for one reason or another, but when exhibitions are open on a thursday and I'm in the area, I go like a shot. 

That meant that a couple of weeks ago I could visit the 2018 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize show.  It feels like a gift to have it available quite so locally, in a relatively small town, but Anita Taylor is helping to put Trowbridge on the artistic map and that's pretty amazing.

The exhibition is scattered through the ground floor of the building and, as always, helps to extend my definition of the idea of drawing. I find it difficult to take good photos there - huge works aren't easy in the space available, and glass reflects everything in such a light venue (some were impossible) - but I do my best, and only resorted to the catalogue in order to include the first prize winner.  Here's a selection (click on photo, or hover over for info).

The first and second prize-winning pieces were both very large, amazing in different ways. I was stunned when I noticed that Moonlit Delphi had been made using biro, felt pen and poster paints - they seem (they are!) such everyday items - while Eden inevitably comes freighted with an unknown story. Boko Haram Kidnapping is all story, with the whole image formed from words - a passionate piece. While the Wind Drawing was one of many I have seen fairly recently (something of a fashion at the moment?), it's hard not to be fascinated by the delicate lines and their cumulative effect. My personal favourite (this keeps happening - I must stop thinking I haven't got time for them) was a video - someone slowly sweeping white shards into a line, from a blue bowl to the viewer. It was calm and mesmerising and I think I could have watched it all day on a loop.

BABE - the Bristol Artists Book Event, and a tag bound to gather a few unbookish follows - only comes round once every two years and is highly popular.  Once the word goes out for booking, you either get on with it straight away or run the risk that within a couple of hours (max) every last table has been snaffled. Two years ago I just managed to book the very last one, so I didn't hang around this time. It only seems to become more sought-after as an event to exhibit at.

It takes place at Arnolfini, on the waterfront - a fantastic spot, especially if the weather plays nice - over two floors, plus talks and presentations on the top floor, and seems to be able to guarantee a steady stream of visitors over both days, even when the sunday is Mothering Sunday. Being on my own, I didn't get an opportunity to see much of the rest of the first floor, nor any of the ground floor, but as I managed to buy a couple of beautiful books within a few tables of mine, that's probably (sadly) all for the best. Met a few instagram connections, sat behind their own tables or standing in front of mine, so that was rather nice.  Missed some stands I meant to visit that were well within reach, so absolutely no excuse.  Enjoyed - as does just about everyone! - the coffee and cake trolley that visits the exhibitors twice a day (the cakes are very very good). Talked about books and folds, life and its various twists good and bad, printmaking and words, to many people till my lips hurt (not sure what that's about). I'd forgotten how much I enjoy these events - I should maybe try for a few more.

I lost my instagram account earlier this month - pinched by a russian bot, I assume, since the linked email address suddenly became  dot ru instead of mine. I accidentally (please don't ask, it makes me feel silly) set up another one the same day, and that was stolen next morning.  I wasn't happy without one, so I gave it a few days before going for a third one, and that has survived so far, though you lose faith in the system.  I disconnected it from here because I've long since forgotten how the code works and couldn't face finding out again in order to update it - I only mention the whole saga at all for the headline :-).

The Flourish part is, of course, the open exhibition at West Yorkshire Print Workshop.  Yesterday was - again, of course - the last day, so off I drove, across the rather miserable Pennines. Flourish always presents an enormously varied offering, both in technique and style, this year ranging from Kate Desforges' gorgeously textural lithograph and Sara Lee's delicate and muted japanese woodcuts, through many other pieces of work, to Theresa Taylor's large copper sulphate etchings. Even in one discipline the different outcomes are fascinating - Maxine Foster combined her screenprints with other techniques (including bandsaw!), Hazel Roberts - who won first prize - produced colourful graphic screenprints, and Nicole Polonsky's work concerning her brother's suicide was enormously poignant. 

Many of the pictures above are details from the original works. This was in most cases because where there was a lack of glass the detail and texture could really be appreciated, and I really did appreciate them - it's a shame that glass, useful and even necessary though it might be as a rule, must provide a barrier to the immediacy of the work.

One last arty thing to mention.  I was waiting for a friend outside Leeds Art Gallery, so went in to see what I could find not far from the entrance.  What I found was Mark Wallinger's 'Threshold to the Kingdom' (2000) - a slow motion video of travellers coming through automatic double doors at International Arrivals, to the strains of Allegri's glorious 'Miserere mei, Deus'.  "The music adds an aura of spiritual mystery to the work and makes the unfolding action appear to be perfectly choreographed" the accompanying board tells you, and says everything that needs to be said.  It was amazing. 

There have been exhibition opportunities too - I had a piece in the Atkinson Gallery's summer exhibition, which I'm pleased to say sold on the opening night (I'm always pleased if something sells - on the opening night is definitely the cherry on the cake), and a piece in Chapel Gallery's open exhibition, and that sold too, again on the opening night, so what's a step up from pleased? Let's go with excited. I had three pieces in the Hebden Bridge exhibition set up to go with the fair, and two of those sold as well, so I reckon I can call that delighted. Seriously, it's all been a bit of a boost and rather good, and it goes without saying that I won't be mentioning the many other exhibitions I failed to get into, because the cherries would taste a little less sweet if I did that. I expect it's partly a case of try try try again (instead of bearing any kind of pointless and ridiculous grudge and feeling all petulant) but mostly learning my level with a degree of humility and realism. It might take me a while. It's not that I have an inflated idea of my abilities (well, I don't think I do), just that I'm not fond of rejection. Who is?      

I've been to the usual scattering of exhibitions too. I was very pleased that Drawing Projects, Trowbridge, was open on a Thursday, so that I was able to catch the last ever Jerwood Drawing Prize (the next one being Trinity Buoy Wharf instead). It was, naturally, full of all sorts of goodies - here's a small selection.   

I went to the exhibitions I had work in (although as usual I didn't make the private views - one day, I like to believe, things will be different). There are so many excellent artists out there and sometimes that can make you wonder what the point is, but of course art really doesn't have to be - really shouldn't be - about being as good as other people. I make prints because my brain spends all its time playing about with arty notions, and printing them helps to shift them on, get them out of my head. I have a love/hate relationship with the whole thing, and presumably after all this time I always will, but in spite of frequently playing with the idea of giving up for good on the whole damn thing, I'm not sure what I'd do without printmaking as an outlet. Hmm, seem to have allowed myself to stray from the subject of exhibitions.

Town Hall Arts in Trowbridge (what is it with Trowbridge at the moment??) currently has the Derwent Art Prize on show - perhaps not as show stopping as last year (I think - memory, eh, what's it good for?) but still good.  Another selection. 

I have the usual long, long list of exhibitions I want to see soon (ie before they finish), and almost certainly I shan't get around to at least half of them, but every visit is better than a miss, and that will have to do.

I'm delighted that I am going to have a table at Hebden Bridge Print Fair in September.  Also a tad apprehensive - what have I let myself in for?  Actually, I can answer that one - quite a lot of printmaking! Also quite a lot of cutting board, and wrapping prints, and thinking about available space, and wondering how to arrange things, and deciding what's in and what's out (or is that a bit optimistic?), and making lists of what I need, and, and, and.

Yes, could be a bit busy for a while.