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.

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.   

And where that six months went, I'm not quite sure. 

Anyway, new year, another batch of good intentions.  One is to be more active on here - surely I can at least manage to do that.  I'm in a new studio - at Hot Bed Press, so with no excuse not to print more, what with the presses being in the same building, on the same floor and literally half a minute's amble away.  It's roomy, bright (until they build the block of flats just across the road, but hey), still has some space in for the moment (not sure how long that'll last) and I love it to bits.  So much so that I have trouble leaving it to reach those aformentioned presses, but I think I can train myself up on that one.

From which you can gather that I've not achieved terribly much recently.  I did manage an edition for the annual 20:20 Print Exchange (and have only just added the print to my exchange page), there was an open studios event alongside the regular Hot Bed Press Under the Bed Sale, which was good fun, and I've been working away in slightly haphazard fashion at any number of collagraph plates, so not entirely nothing.  Even so.

Oh, and a course with Sumi Perera at West Yorkshire Print Workshop.  I didn't take away as much as I should have, in terms of expanded practice, due to a tendency not to move too far from my comfort zone, but everything was interesting and perhaps I've squirreled away more exciting intentions than I realise yet.  We got to see plenty of her work, which as I might have mentioned before I find fascinating.  Also the open print exhibition - some fantastic stuff, from which unaccountably I only have photos of one artist's work.  And I did manage a few prints that I'm relatively happy with - the one above was one, an old piece overprinted with (inevitably) a collagraph.

My most recent source of excitement was taking a course with Sylvia Waltering to learn (I have a suspicion that it was relearn, but we'll glide lightly past that) how to make a clamshell box.  Useful for putting prints or artist books in, but actually fun just for the boxes.  I even went away and made another one (trying to fix the techniques in my head before they dribble away through that annoying hole somewhere at the back of my memory) and intend to keep up the practising, perhaps even experimenting a little on my own.  I'm indulging my inner colour junky at the moment, but have every intention of trying for muted later on.  Probably should come up with some kind of purpose for them.      

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.        

To have an artists' book fair and an exhibition preview (with much attendant prep) in the space of six days is not ideal, but hey, if that's the way the cards fall, what are you going to do?  In the event, both went well and were great fun, so maybe it is the way to do it.  Still a little stiff from the unaccustomed exercise of painting walls, though.

A part of my brain, the part that wasn't zoned out, wondered if I was deliberately sabotaging myself.  And if so, why?  The sluggish part said 'shh, watching something'.  Eventually I did get going on a project, but it was genuinely too late and I didn't make it to the end - this is something that has been worrying me for years, that one day I just wouldn't beat the deadline.  Well now it's happened, and I'm not too impressed at myself, though I had enough stock so it wasn't the end of the world.  I think I knew that, and I ask again - did I sabotage myself?  Probably unanswerable, so I'll, um, put off thinking about it till it's almost too late for something or other.  Meanwhile, I did produce a lot of useful prep towards the book, and next time it'll be fine.  I expect.    

I reached the fair last Saturday morning (dramatically snowy over the Pennines) in a much better state of mind and (of course) enjoyed myself as much as usual.  I had a very erratic look round the rest of the fair, having long chats with some folks and failing to see some tables except to know I should have paid more attention, but it's hard to be behind a table as well as see everything else.  For me at least.  I think it's a part of the fading ability to multitask from which I've been suffering in recent years.  I popped into the room holding vast numbers of David Barton's books on show (the picture below left was only a fraction of them!) and into the one holding Craig Atherton's Cafe Royal books (very smart, below right), and was very impressed with a gigantic book on display - the Bathymetric Atlas of the English Lake District. This enormous and pristine tome - it takes two be-gloved people to turn the pages, at set times during the week - shows the basins of the lakes, intricately cut away from vast, glued, double sheets of paper, like a negative version of building up mountains contour by contour. I only caught a section of the page-turning ceremony, but I think someone said that the depths of Lake Windermere appeared (or, I suppose, disappeared) first.  It was surprisingly compelling to watch.        

The preview for our Group Thirteen exhibition was on the Thursday evening, and there was a lot to do for it which (of course) I hadn't been able to concentrate on before the book fair.  So, having found a room to myself within the allocated space at Hot Bed Press, I painted the walls in an agonised shade of blue - agonised in that it took me much agonising to reach a decision on exactly which shade.  Really?  For a fortnight's exhibition?  Yes, but it was important to me.  I managed the blue all in one day, and woke up in the middle of the night deciding that it was far too bright, but luckily by morning I'd decided that it wasn't (and that if it was, I'd just have to live with it).  That, white paint on other bits and all the actual hanging left me unbelievably achy - unfitness doesn't mean you can't do these things, just that you suffer for them after.  Still, probably good for me, and it was worth it - I might not have been ready till 20 minutes before opening, but I got there and I was happy with the results.

The exhibition is in an enormous space, giving us each the opportunity to organise our chosen patch exactly as we like, and resulting in what is really a number of mini-galleries.  Work covers the inevitable trees, landscape, floral, birds, but also abstract, flotsam, ceramics, skulls, taxidermy, upholstery and insects.  And more.  I'm biased, of course, but I'd say definitely worth a visit (last day 23rd March, not open Sundays).  In an effort to tempt would-be visitors, here's a selection of what's on show. 

For the last three years I've been a Complete Printmaker at Hot Bed Press - it's a course for anyone, from those who pretty much can print to those who never have, taking them all through a number of basic and more sophisticated printmaking methods in year 1, increasing both the breadth and depth of understanding in year 2, and finishing off with a more free-form approach and some masterclasses -  ours were with Elizabeth Willow, Lucy May Schofield, Jason Hicklin and Kip Gresham - in year 3.

We were the very first, and as we grew, the course grew with us, from one to two to three years.  Many of us who set out together still choose to print on the same day as each other, where we can, and have learnt from each other as well as from the course.  We each approach our chosen subjects so very differently that it would be impossible not to pick up a few new directions, new ways of thinking, from the other imaginations around us.  While we've all worked away to our own chosen ends, we've also participated as a group in shows - our own exhibition at RKB Gallery in London was something of a highlight - and at print fairs.  What happens next will be up to us, obviously, but meanwhile to mark the end of three years we're having one last hoorah - a final group exhibition under the Hot Bed Press banner.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but the private view will be at the Casket Works on the evening of Thursday 10th March and the exhibition will run for a fortnight.  I'll post more info as soon as we have it.

So I didn't get 'Conference of Trees' accepted for the RWA's open exhibition in Bristol (sad face), but I did have 'Lone Pine' hanging at the Manchester Contemporary this weekend.  Or possibly Buy Art (I'm confused).  Hot Bed Press has had a stand there, anyway, complete with a mini functioning print workshop - today there was a letterpress demo and later a woodcut demo, and it all looked rather good.

Centre: Oliver Flude preparing to ink up and print one of his woodcuts.  L and R: a mini letterpress area, complete with Adana press
.

Bristol is my first experience of getting through the digital selection but not through the real thing (well let's be fair, my experience is pretty limited).  Obviously I wanted to be selected, but part of that was about the getting there last week.  I wove such a tangled ribbon of a route through the city that I didn't (don't!) fancy doing it again too soon.  However, at least I shall be at the right end of the country to collect when I'm meant to, which is something.  Shall I try again, another time?  I don't know.

And the UWE Bookmarks XIII has gone live.  We've all had our sets of bookmarks long since, but now they're out there for everyone else too.

Apart from that, the annual Manchester Artists' Book Fair blocks out everything.  It just seeps into every corner of my thoughts and by the time it's all (checks time) very nearly over, 3 weeks from now, I might have forgotten how to print altogether.  Still, I seem eventually to remember how, each year, so I guess no harm done.  I don't think I'm terribly good at compartmentalising, is part of the problem, and if I haven't sorted that by my age, I don't imagine I'm going to acquire the skill any time soon.

So way back when, I signed up for a weekend of Japanese bookbinding and box making with Lucy May Schofield at Hot Bed Press, and this last weekend it arrived.  Lucy was fresh from Japan, where she currently lives, and back in Britain for a series of workshops, residencies, talks and the like - we were the first lucky few to benefit from her visit (and her green tea biscuits). 

We had a fantastic time, making four little books with Japanese stab stitch bindings - I've tried this before, with Elizabeth Willow, and enjoyed it immensely; the bindings look great and are relatively simple to create.  This time we added fiddly but (and I might have been alone in thinking this, they were something of a faff to deal with) ultimately very satisfying corners to the books, and the covers had neatly folded tiny TINY edges (my patience didn't stretch that far!  I cheated and stuck most of mine - it was either that or scream, tear everything up and throw the pieces into the air).

But the wraparound box was the thing of true beauty, and I was in love from the moment Lucy handed around an example on the Saturday morning.  In fact overall it wasn't dreadfully complicated either, and I would be happy to make another one.  Soon, before it becomes more complex in my memory.  Much of it is about being reasonably precise (so I should probably get past the occasional problem I have where I think I'm joining up two points to finish off a square or a rectangle, yet somehow I end up with something more akin to a potting shed) and - when I'm in the zone - that's not really a problem.  Lucy had brought us a selection of japanese papers for the covers, and pieces of kimono fabric for the boxes - all very vibrant, and a picture of everyone's work at the end would have been a riot of colour, but you'll just have to make do with mine.