Newcastle and just a little bit of the International Print Biennale

We missed the promised stormy weather with cascades of lightning, the oodles of rain (until the way home), the hail, even the muggy atmosphere.  Instead we had sunshine, a (really very) fresh breeze and a short day and a half of walking along seaside streets, on idyllic silver-sanded beaches and around Newcastle - in the latter case, mostly hunting down print.   

Because, of course, the International Print Biennale is currently on, at a scattering of locations in and around Newcastle.  I had great plans, although from the very start it was agreed that if the weather was good we'd spend time out of town and fit some print in around that.  So that was what we ended up doing.  Tynemouth turned out to be a pleasant little seaside town (I was rather taken with the Barca Art Bar where, looking in through the window, I could see WWII plastic soldiers fighting it out across the ceiling), and Druridge Bay was a miles-long gentle crescent of beautiful sand and picturebook rolling waves all under a summery blue sky, with perhaps as many as a dozen people to share it with.

On the gallery side, we managed the Laing, Baltic, the Hatton and the Biscuit Factory.  The larger part of the main Biennale exhibition was in the Hatton Gallery, but I failed to see the other part, at Northern Print, because we arrived there at a minute past 4 o'clock so the gallery was shut.  I did think of attracting the attention of one of the printmakers and trying to persuade them to let me have a quick look anyway, but it seemed a bit of a nerve so I settled for feeling discontented instead.  It made me wonder, though, whether any of those printmakers whose work ended up there felt a little short-changed regarding opening hours and therefore exposure to the public.  Perhaps?  Perhaps not?  I suppose getting into the show's the thing - the rest is icing.

The Laing exhibition (Thomas Bewick and his apprentices) was fine, I'm sure - I know Thomas Bewick is a brilliant wood engraver but knowing that is all I need, I'm afraid, and besides, it seems a remarkably short time since I went to a lecture at MMU Special Collections on the very same topic.  I did like some of the paintings by his apprentice Luke Clennell, but really we just went in to make a start - sort of like breaking through the shell. 

The Baltic exhibitions were nothing to do with printmaking at all, but hey, the gallery was there, why not?  Of the three, Lydia Gifford's was, with the benefit of hindsight, the only show I'd go back and try again (at the time, I mostly wasn't so sure, but by the time I'd gone up a floor or two, I'd decided a lot of it was really quite interesting though I would have preferred it in a smaller space - I don't think all the room around each piece added anything at all.  Except room, of course).  Nina Canell's exhibition formed an empty sort of question mark in my mind and nothing else at all, and Daniel Buren's was, well, pleasant.  The stripes were stripes, the blocks were blocks, the colours were colourful.  It did what (so far as I recall) it was meant to, though, which (I think) was to make the viewer pay attention to the areas around the works - during the actual visit to Baltic, what I enjoyed most of all was the play of colour, courtesy of Buren, across the flooring. 

Dealing briefly with the Biscuit Factory, I expected an art gallery and got a shop.  A brilliant gallery of a shop, full of 2D and 3D I'd-like artworks, but more a shop than a gallery nonetheless.  I had the opportunity to reassess some of the printmakers from Ulverston's Printfest, and I did change my mind about some of them.  Specifically Alan Stones, whose works I knew ought to be my sort of thing even when I was there, but it wasn't clicking then.  They consist of deceptively simple and sparse black marks to render an image across a generous white background - very pleasing, and here I liked them much better, which says something either about me or about the importance of location.  What I mostly liked, though, were the birds - an outsize cormorant (sorry, artist, never noticed who you were) made of porcelain paper clay and beautiful markings, and a couple of metal flamingos in a metal umbrella stand (sorry to another artist) called Croquet Set, which was just perfect.  Oh and some painterly landscape photos by Sarah Tod - I looked her up later, and the painterly effect is because she overprints the same scene several times.  They were very soft and atmospheric.   

Window glass at the Biscuit Factory

Which brings me at last to the Hatton Gallery.  This was what I came for - contemporary printmaking - and it didn't disappoint.  There were, of course, any number of brilliant works on a technical level.  I thought Kraisak Chirachaisakul's mezzotints were jaw dropping (I've had an abortive go at mezzotint) and visually fascinating too.  Trevor Banthorpe's large multi-woodblock prints were wow! to look at up close, with the picture built up out of the thickness of horizontal lines, but I confess that as prints to enjoy they weren't my thing at all.  Ewelina Szydelko's 360 degrees series of prints, of vertiginous, disorientating stairwells, were massively large and involving.  I rather liked the idea of Julie Roch-Cuerrier, who sanded off the surfaces of old maps and created new inks from the dust, which she then used to print pale coloured squares named after the original areas of the map, but although they were clever and thoughtful, they weren't exactly visually engaging.

    

I really liked Skating, by Richard Ford (author) and Jane Kent (invited printmaker), but mostly for the story, which almost entirely distracted me from looking at the printmaking - I did look, though, and didn't really see how they particularly tied together, although I can see now how much the combination enhances the storytelling.  Print playing a supporting role, rather than centre stage.  Richard Forster's sea edges were good too, though I think in the end I preferred the idea of them to the actual prints.

My own favourites were particularly Ann Aspinwall's series of collagraphs of paving setts in various cities

'London, 2013' - collagraph, hand colouring and chine collé

and Milos Djordjevic's telegraph poles on what look like torn plates,

'Cascade, variation 0.7, 2009' - drypoint on aluminium. Damages purposely performed by mechanical means

and also Victoria Burge's Night Pixel prints,

'Night Pixel 1, 2012' - relief print with embossment and hand colour

All in variations on the theme of black, white, shades of grey, which I think is quite unusual for me.  Looking back now, it seems that nearly all the other prints I liked there were lacking in colour, too, whereas at so many print exhibitions I find myself crying out for a change from the overwhelming sea of just about no colour at all.  I like to think that goes to show that, after all, it's all about how much the image appeals - colour is just incidental.

I wish I could have taken in more of the Biennale, because there we actually were, and it won't come around again for (at least) another two years.  But I'd rather have been able to spread any more over a few days and anyway I was very pleased with what I did get to see.  It was enough, in the time we had.

The Hatton Gallery is part of Newcastle University - as we left, I was delighted by two very artful university windows - art is where you find it, don't you think?