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.

So keen am I not to miss everything going that I have been to three events this week (the first two of them on the same day and in opposite directions, which was a bit over the top), all of which coincidentally touched on or totally embraced anxieties about the environment.  The third was a brief talk by Susie Turner about her work with solar plates and the second was Richard Dawson and Jacqui Symons' Oldham exhibition Natural: History (a fable of progress, or 'Oh no, we've killed the last unicorn' which was amazing but I want to come back to it after I've made a second, longer visit.  So for now I'll talk about the first.  

I've realised that I need to sign up for emails to keep up with what's happening to a greater extent - if I read them, of course, which is partly why I previously haven't bothered very much.  I get impatient and delete them in droves, unopened, though I'm trying to train myself not to do that.  With increased connection in my mind I resubscribed to Warrington Museum and Art Gallery's one and the first thing that came up was a talk by Tracy Hill, connected to her exhibition there, Haecceity (the word described on google as being "that property or quality of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as ‘this (one)’" - its thisness).  As I drove west on the first sunny and warm day of the year - and I mean wall to wall sunshine and positively summery - I knew I should really be mowing (suddenly the grass is loooong!) or starting on the destruction of the rotting shed, but I am so glad I didn't give in to garden duties.  I went because the pictures of work at the exhibition were like her prints that I had seen at WYPW at the end of last year, and I was keen to see more - and know more.  The talk the artist gave rooted the work in her practice and gave it so much more depth than I could possibly have culled from the noticeboard. Her work could loosely be described as landscape art, but that on its own would tell you nothing about it - it derives from landscape (in this case Mosses, of the local geographical kind) and depicts landscape, but to recognise it immediately as landscape would take considerably more imagination than I have.

Gathering information from the board at the exhibition, her talk and her website I discovered that, more specifically, her practice is concerned with the historical legacy of post-industrial landscapes and ideas around place.  She uses digital mapping technology to scan her chosen area of landscape, then manipulates the visual results.  For Haecceity the results of this process were projected on to the black-painted walls and she produced her drawings (in limestone) starting from those projections.  She is passionate about the Mosses, their slow destruction by drainage and their lack of consideration because they are - on initial glance - unattractive edgelands with little to recommend them.  The works produced from this process - and her commitment to the landscapes behind them - are beautifully textural and airy, and inevitably I see them completely differently now that I know the back story.  My only contact with this type of landscape has been a couple of brief visits to Red Moss near Bolton, as part of a son's geography project, and as we felt like borderline trespassers both times I didn't pay much attention except to a great flock of fieldfares and redwings making their way across the land, but now I'd like to find out more about this kind of terrain.

The artist has other works on show too - black on white instead of white on black, screenprinted, similar in style but made using conductive or capacitive ink.  This means - in this case - that the viewer can press on the black areas of the print and trigger a recording from the Mosses.  Four prints, four recordings, capable of being played individually or together if you wander round pressing them all in turn.  I was a little sceptical at first - a gimmicky thing, I assumed - but it added a real sense of place, grounded the whole thing, and I was a total convert.  I was particularly hooked by the noise of a plane passing overhead, which more than anything else put me right in the middle of this flat, bleak, soggy place and... just left me there.  Fascinating talk, great exhibition, worth a couple of hours of anybody's time.  Brilliant.

I know it's rather showy offy, but look at this collection of my collagraphs at the house of friends of ours.  Am I embarrassed, and determined to brush the whole thing off as rather ridiculous?  Obviously!  Of course I am.  Nevertheless, it's sort of exciting too, a little bit of a thrill.  Inevitably I look at them and think, hmm, that isn't so good, that bit there, and really those colours, I'm not at all sure.  And so on and so forth to the end of time.  I'm not wrong either, but how often have I ever been completely pleased with my work?  Put it this way, a second hand will definitely not be needed for counting on fingers. What I know I should do in this case is shut up and be pleased that out there, in the world, is a wall of my prints. 

Yes, time passes.  It does that, I find, and nowadays fades off into the middle distance with increasing rapidity.  For instance, some weeks ago I was going to talk about Fringe Arts Bath.  Bit late now, so suffice to say that there were - as ever - some thought-provoking exhibitions on subjects including obsession, migration, walking the landscape, blue, as well as an open exhibition, and some excellent work everywhere I went.  Here's a handful of images (hover over for information, where I've remembered to collect it) from, alas, not enough time spent at not enough of the scattered venues.  And it was raining.

I was going to talk, too, about the sketchbook exhibition at Rabley Drawing Centre.  No pics, alas, except of the decidedly rural location (I got myself pretty much lost, after, and had in the end to to retrace my steps or risk being stuck down some track with nowhere to turn, a truly horrendous distance to reverse, and the knowledge that I still had to drive halfway up the country preferably before nightfall).  It was a fascinating show, with a million (oh alright, I think it might have been a hundred) very varied sketchbooks - and ur-sketchbooks.  Very beautiful, some of them, but manifestly constructed for precisely that purpose.  I recognised, though didn't always appreciate, the ones with gappy missed pages, other pages started with a few hopeful lines and then abandoned - those I knew were sketchbooks.  It's partly why I don't bother much myself.  I didn't have too much problem either with the ones full of stuck-in sketches - alright, so they had doubtless been curated, with scrappy scribbles not included unless they were terribly meaningful scrappy scribbles, but as someone who draws on such odd bits of paper as are hanging around I understand that the physical book form might never originally have existed.  There were books crammed full of exquisite drawings, coloured in and, from my perspective, probably as good as or better than any finished work deriving from them - they mostly caused envy of the observational skills and drawing abilities.  My problem was with the beautiful books, where sometimes you could see exactly how work had been cut up to make the pages.  However lovely, I couldn't bring myself to think of them as sketchbooks.  Still, it was good enough that I shall catch the show again - perhaps at Black Swan Arts in Frome - when it tours (tour venues and dates under sketchbook exhibition link above).

Those exhibitions were many weeks ago, now, and on my last trip exhibitions didn't play much part, except for Trowbridge's Town Hall Arts' inaugural Open Exhibition - with two recent works in it, I made the effort to get to the opening before driving north.  Again, a selection of work below, mostly accompanied by artist names (I'll make sure I find the missing one on another visit and fill it in later).  The top two are mine.  I hope the show's a success for Town Hall Arts and grows year on year.

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.        

It was never meant to be, this urban reserve tucked between flats and roads and railway arches.  If there hand been no global downturn, no subsequent recession, it would already have been a rash of buildings by now, towering over its neighbours. Offices, shops, bars, more flats - probably elegant squares, raised flower beds, a few graceful, obedient trees. 

Instead, chancer edgeland plants took advantage of every gap and crack in the concrete remains of this patch of land and turned it into their scrappy, verdant, wasteland home.  For ignorant years I paid it no heed - never truly even saw it there.  I'm not sure when my moment of conversion arrived, but one day I wondered, and wandered, and was hooked.

What?  Where?  I'm talking about Middlewood Locks in Salford, at the erstwhile start of the Manchester Bolton Bury canal.  It's across the road from Hot Bed Press, and has been a scrubby stretch of unkempt land ever since I joined the printmaking studio.  Now it's fenced off and full of bulldozers, towering hills of soil, of bricks, and becoming after all what was originally intended.  

But while it lasted it had a fragile beauty on the unbuilt, gentle slope.  During the warmer months, a summer tapestry in old gold, shot through with threads of jade and sunshine, soft ruby and clear skies.  The comfortable hum of bumble bees, the heat-shimmer whirr of grasshoppers; impressionist butterfly wings, jazzy daytime moths.  Above the acid green marbling on the truncated stretches of canal darted electric blue damselflies.  Birds?  I never saw much beyond pigeons and corvids, although I heard there were wheatears in summer.  Mostly I was looking down, like those people in the carpet ads, seeing what was underfoot. 

In winter it shrank back to a world of concrete and tarmac, scattered with tired grass and hinting at nothing.  No whispers of the vast drifts of coltsfoot to come; not a single thing to hint at a later season's bee orchids.  The joy of the place was not so much in the individual plants (although it was that too) as in their joint profusion.  That tapestry again - the differing leaf shapes, shades, textures, the interweaving of colours and heights, the mass of insect life.  Everything belonged.  Ragwort, for instance - it wouldn't be welcome anywhere else, but here it was at home, side by side with red clover and melilot, moon daisies and vetches.  Nothing crowded out anything else, there was room for all.

This was no park.  It was an abandoned site, and while in that state it was doubtless used for all sorts.  Plenty of rubbish was dotted around but it didn't appear to dominate, or perhaps I just took little notice - it wasn't what I was there for.  In truth Middlewood Locks was a confusion of common weeds, large and small, of regular insects, of scummy water and detritus, nothing more, but for me this temporary and shabby oasis was a world of small beauties, slow pleasures.  It yielded up its secret delights when it chose.

It was closer looking that delivered little thrills.  It took me many visits before I noticed, for instance, that at the heart of each hogweed umbrel (well, probably hogweed - I remain wary around a group of superficially similar flowers that encompasses many poisonous ones, including hemlock) there was a single floret coloured anything from blush pink to deep, rich, wine red.  

In the end the site was re-sold, after which transformation was only a matter of time.  A bank and ditch system was flung up around its border - a hint of hill fort - and now it has become a fortress, barred and locked and guarded.  Who knows, perhaps its ephemeral state was a part of the attraction?  Certainly, that a rich and varied garden could grow on such unpromising ground was heartening, and it consoles me to know that the natural world has the ability to take advantage of the slightest window.  In the end, wherever, it tends to win out.  I find that hopeful.    

I mentioned that Earthlines magazine had very generously shown an interest in some of my work being in their magazine?  Well it's happened, and I'm delighted.  I don't quite believe in it - seeing it printed there on the page creates an odd sort of distance.  It's still mine, but...  Anyway, it arrived on that friday (you know the one) and gave me something to smile about. 

I find it effortless to combine utter delight when my work is appreciated with complete disbelief, um, when my work is appreciated.  I expect many people do.  Thus it was when David Knowles of Earthlines magazine got in touch to ask if they could include a couple of my pieces in one of their issues.  Could they?  Well of course, absolutely, wow, point the way.  Also why on earth me, when I would surely be so far down anyone's list of options that I'd be falling off the bottom?  However, that way madness lies, not to mention sitting in a corner with a blanket over my head.  And perhaps a small whisky.  Or indeed a large one.  So after asking anyway (though couched less pathetically), I eagerly clambered on board, and am looking forward in a few months' time to opening a copy and seeing my prints there, on the page.  Coo.

The world seems to have filled up with all sorts of fascinating magazines recently - by which I obviously mean that I have recently discovered the world to be filled with all sorts of fascinating magazines.  For this fact I blame the brilliant Magalleria in Bath (every time I go in there, there's something to intrigue) and social media, through which everything can be found sooner or later. 

Though I cannot for the life of me remember exactly how I came across it, I think Twitter was where I first discovered Earthlines.  It's my sort of reading matter, it comes optionally as a paper copy (sorry, just can't comfortably do the digital thing, even though I know it's greener) and also it immediately appealed to my sense of guilt that the editors and contributors are everything I'm not - committed, living their belief system, intensely in touch with their patch of the world.  Because they work at it.  Me, I like to read about such folk and think vaguely that I could be rather more like that if circumstances were different, but I know it isn't true.  I know that, though once I thought differently, I'm not cut out to be a rural person (I know, not a prerequisite).  I know also that the bit I truly want to match is the paying attention, and if I had any kind of commitment then I could practise that in, for instance, my parents' garden (tending to wilderness in parts) where there is an abundance of wild plants, insects and wildlife of various sorts - even if the birds irritate my mother by generally choosing to eat next door.  They might live on a housing estate, but it's one where they regularly used to meet badgers coming down other people's front paths when they walked the dog late at night, not to mention the one that holed up under their shed for a day.  For a while there was a partridge roaming about too - just as my father was wishing I could see it and I was staring out the front window, there it was strolling down the concrete drive opposite.  Beautiful timing, and its attitude was so utterly relaxed.  They have resident toads and plenty of slow worms, a wider range of butterflies in a day than I would normally see in a month, the usual range of small mammals perfectly designed for our past cats to leave as sad little corpses next to the milk bottles.  Less welcome local rats, too, for a while, scurrying or sauntering past the back door on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, but neighbours have probably put paid to them, they haven't been seen in a while now. 

Suffice to say that there would be plenty just there for me to study more closely if I truly wanted to, so doubtless the issue is, as usual, to do with insufficient will.  Maybe one day I'll get there, but meanwhile I walk with a friend round a popular local reservoir, where we delight in the chance encounters - goldcrests in the conifers, a stoat completely oblivious to us and weaving in and out of a low stone wall, deer, a dipper (only ever one, and that rarely), treecreepers, grumpy-great-uncle herons.  Though it's not the wildest of environments, we can still watch the change of season, year after year enjoy the butterbur, the first blossom, the orchids, the annoying tendency of the great crested grebes never to do their mating thing while we're around, even if they did once form a heart between them and we waited hopefully for, oh, ages.  For now, and perhaps forever, all of this is enough of a thrill, but it doesn't stop me having a sort of lazy envy of people who try harder, live deeper.     

I think I've worked out at least one reason why April is the cruellest month.  Nearly every day this last week, the sun came out at regular intervals and filled the world with enough glorious, encouraging light - and, in protected spots out of the wind, warmth - surely to tempt a slow worm out from under its stone (found a few in my parents' garden, sensibly hiding).  And, every single time, within ten or so minutes it was suddenly gone and instead we had hail or snow. And then back to the obviously-set-for the-day sunshine, pretending it never went away.  Repeat repeat repeat - crazy weather.  But the skies, oh! the skies.  As the heavens prepared to deliver the next icy shock, the sky would turn dense, dark storm blue, with everything startlingly spotlit against it, or it would be fantastically sculpted from deep indigo clouds, carved through to the lighter shades within.  The lighting has been incredible and made for some stunning colours -  as ever, the improbable acid green of ordinarily grass-green fields, but also a claret-leafed tree across the river valley, and (a favourite blend) the russet-red new growth of pollarded lime trees glowing against a background of pure white blossom in the churchyard - just gorgeous.

More prosaically, I was pleased to have a piece of work selected for the latest Bath Society of Artists' Summer Exhibition, though faintly surprised that, of the two I submitted, 'Gather' was the one that made it in. I'm not complaining, more intrigued at how these things go.

It's as fun as all the other summer (well, more or less summer, anyway) shows I've visited at the Victoria Art Gallery down the years.  As ever, I like some works, don't like others, know that most of this is purely down to my particular taste and (not knowing what's what, but not prepared to allow for that) feel that a few are just plain poor.  I liked some winners, couldn't get my head round others, frankly laughed at one or two (that's frankly laughed inside my head - I wasn't sharing my views).  I like that I recognise a handful of my favourite artists by now, and notice when others aren't on the walls.  One day I shall make the effort to put aside a fund from any sales of my own work throughout the year(s), then allow myself a painting.

Favourites?  As ever, I love Amanda Ralfe's chalky paintings.

Also works by Andrew Lansley, Rosie Mack, Richard Twose and many others.  Some are below - hover over them for name and artist.  I should probably point out that nobody's work was actually a not-quite-rectangle - any and all optical whatnots should be attributed to the photographer (sorry).

I always feel that I don't give the sculpture at the show enough space - I enjoy the 3D work, but if I'm not careful I find I treat it mostly as obstacles to avoid while looking at the walls, hazards that must not be knocked over.  Also, it's easy to lose sight of the individual pieces.  The walls might be richly full, but I find myself able to concentrate on the piece in front of me and ignore those around it.  With the sculptures, though, the busy-ness of the background makes that more difficult, for me certainly.  It's an odd sensation - I walk round, carefully trying to focus my attention on the sculptures, but as often as not it just scatters.  Nevertheless, I persevered.  Here's a selection I liked, but there might be others where I.  Just.  Couldn't.  Oh look, paintings! 

Next up, I'm hoping to see the Discerning Eye exhibition, which has rocked up in - surely one of the most unlikely places - Trowbridge.  I'll have to see what I can manage. 

South yet again - and the roads were horrendous on the way down and twice as bad on the way up.  I know it was half term, but I've travelled the same route during half terms before.  So many journeys have been so poor in recent months that I'm starting to wonder if I should double the estimated time before I set out - at least that way I might be pleasantly surprised every now and then.

However, what can you do but live with it?  The array of autumnal colour when I got there was glorious - I felt as if I'd caught it at exactly the right moment - and I thoroughly enjoyed a couple of exhibitions too.  That'll do nicely.

The Kurt Jackson exhibition Place was - is - on at the Victoria Art Gallery.  I like his work.  I think.  I think?  I know, that sounds grudging, and I'm afraid I'm going to be very woolly about what I mean, because I haven't altogether pinned it down myself.  My feelings vary from work to work, fair enough, but it's to do with mood too, of course.  On one day I will find his work altogether too green-and-pleasant, with stuck-on bits (shells, pebbles) about which I have grave doubts.  On another I will be delighted by the sparkle of water; the jungle-like tangle of undergrowth and the heavy green light next to a river; the way he can capture flat silver water on a wide beach.  Today I might like the random lines and the scribbled words.  Tomorrow I might think they're a scruffy mess.  All of that doesn't really matter, I know, and on this occasion I was very taken with the whole idea of the exhibition.

Which was that he asked a number of people he knew to suggest a place to him, somewhere that meant something to them in some way, and write a page or so about it in any way they chose.  Then he would go there and make work about the place.  Place.  It's another angle on what fascinates me - the links between the landscape (urban and rural) and ourselves, what we do to it and what it does to us.  I was bound to be drawn in. 

The painting of Badbury Rings grabbed me instantly - a hill fort, very Wiltshire plains (even though it isn't) - and I especially loved the list of butterflies, birds, plants he found there and added into the image.  Because I do that collecting thing too.  See?  I'm so not consistent, but whatever, I'm allowed. I liked the rubbing of a sign added into a welsh location too.  The puffin skull might well have been my favourite 'thing' there, but just because it's so beautiful in itself - it was actually part of a little St Andrews collection that was far too golf orientated to appeal to me (though as the location in this piece was a golf course, I think, fair enough).  There were housing estates and stretches of road traffic and Glastonbury in the festival season, there was very large and very small, there was a sculptural piece of a signpost with a bird on top.  I'll be visiting again on my next trip, and no doubt a completely different set of work will appeal then.  Or not.

I've no idea what was on at the Quercus Gallery (which has become a regular stopping off point) because it was unexpectedly closed when it should have been open - who knows? traffic? a flooded kitchen? hopefully nothing worse - but Bath Contemporary Art's exhibition was Pure Pigment, which, as a name to conjure up promise, was always going to get me through the door.  Surely intense, matt colour; think Cornelisson's brightly hued jars of magic.  It turned out to be a collection of artists using pastels, which wouldn't have been half as effective as a lure, but I'd have missed out because it was everything the title suggested.

Out of the half dozen or so artists taking part - and not surprisingly they all had their own appeal - I particularly liked Moira Huntly's landscapes (they made me want to go straight out with a sketchbook, and not much does that to me), Sandra Bee's more bucolic images (I particularly liked her oak tree) and above all Jeanette Hayes' colourful and quite abstracted work, which gave me plenty to think about. 

Having checked the gallery website, I can see I caught this exhibition in the final week - very glad I did.

It was a busy few days, and at times chock-full of inspiration (though I should have made a list for later!).  Now I have at least a good solid fortnight of 20:20 sorting ahead, plus making sure I have work for the Leeds and Sheffield print fairs (which take place the next two saturdays).  After that, space in which to go out and make the most of what's left of autumn.  I'm looking forward to that.