Prints, bookmarks and pots

The opening for Hot from the Press was a quiet affair, which I felt was rather a shame for Emma Kelly, the curator of The Gallery at St George's House, after all the effort she put in.  However, lovely people we knew turned up, and I thought that was very generous of them, and Katy Hollinshead (another of the exhibitors) pulled exactly the same trick as she had done in our recent London exhibition, which was to sell on the opening day!  Good for her!

Anyway, thank you very much to Emma for all her hard work making us look so shiny.  It's a good do, our exhibition, even if I say so as shouldn't, and I hope lots of people take the opportunity to go and admire the work of five very different printmakers.  

I reached home to find a chunky little package from Bristol had arrived - my collection of bookmarks from the annual UWE exchange. They're always enormous fun, though when I got to my own representative one I realised that I had neither signed nor numbered them.  Oops - sorry Sarah.  Here are some, but nowhere near all, of them.

With Sunday came (the third and final day of) Potfest in the Park, a feast of ceramics at Hutton-in-the-Forest, north of Penrith.  Rain was promised for later, so I started reasonably early and was pleased to do the rounds before a persistent drizzle settled in.
As usual, amazing pottery wherever I looked.  One of the few things that maturity has delivered to me, though, is enough sense to realise that there really is nowhere at home for big or delicate pieces, and anything I get at the moment has either to serve a purpose or be able to be hung on the wall. So with that knowledge hanging around in the back of my mind, I ended up with a couple of delightful little beakers (Michelle Young-Hares) and a wall plaque (Andrew Adair), and plans for next year.  Well done me, since I was unlikely to come home with nothing.

I took pics of a representative group of favourites.  It's always a little tricky, because what the exhibitors really want, of course, is that I should buy something (which is exactly what I would want if I were them), but they're all very decent about it if I ask to take photos.

After that, I went off tree-searching (for prints) on a circuitous route home.  Not entirely successful, as a tree search - the rain was not a plus for that - but very beautiful, and at least in part because of the rain.  Hills were a subtle, misty background, and of course wild and lonely and all you might expect of Cumbrian hills on the edge of the Lake District; everything else seemed to be designed in muted sweeps of watercolour - a wash of pink here, for rosebay willowherb; a soft patch of pink-tinged creams there to represent hogweed; brushstrokes loaded with blues for the geraniums; something a little choppier in greys to suggest rocks.  A splatter of sunshine yellow and wine red and rich clotted cream for other flowers dotted about.  A startlingly lemon green amongst the gentler greens for recently-mown fields.  And plenty of villages built in the faintly reddish stone of the area, where all the buildings looking built to withstand the worst winter can throw at them ('we'll be fine holed up here till spring comes').  Very soothing and exhilarating all at once.  I'll collect trees another day.