It has been a hectic end to the month. Lots of activity for Frack Free Kirby Misperton and Ryedale, I finished the piece for "Democracy Rocks" and helped to set up the exhibition, which opened yesterday. Plus a good experience at a local printers, where I took a series of paintings that work as one piece, to be printed in a short edition of each, with a view to selling some. I am actually preparing ahead for North Yorkshire Open Studios!
My piece for "Democracy Rocks", The Mud and the Sheen*, is a first for me, because I have never made an installation of my own work before. I am pleased with the results, although, against my better judgement I have scattered too much preparatory work at its base, losing the cleanness of where the loops of paper almost touch the floor. If I ever install it again, elsewhere, I will avoid that. In the end, it was installed near a back corner of the gallery, simply because it was easier to suspend the work from there and it looks good; the added height of the gallery ceiling enabled me to increase the height of the work too, making it even more relevant to the meaning of the piece. I have really enjoyed the challenge of creating a two dimensional print and presenting it in three dimensions.
*p194, Jackson Pollock's Abstraction, Timothy J Clark, in Reconstructing Modernism, Art in New York, Paris and Montreal, 1945-1964. Ed: Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.
The private view was quite well attended, there has been a lot of media interest too. I hate posing for photographs, why is it that newspaper photographers always seem to work to such awful, cliche ridden ideas of what makes a good photograph? It makes me laugh and shudder at the awful banality of it!
I enjoyed being part of the team that set up this extraordinary exhibition that includes work by young people and professional artists. I can thoroughly recommend a visit and when you do, don't forget to post a vote for your favourite pieces and write on a post it note about what democracy means to you, using the polling booth. You might even like to have a go at drumming on one of the decorated ballot boxes!
Seasons
Artist Ian Mitchell http://www.ianmitchell-art.com/ recommended Norton Print and Frame http://www.fineart.co.uk/directory/fruit-art-ltd_100032.aspx?DirectorySearchPageId=5 to me as the best people to approach about having some prints made of a series of paintings I made a couple of years ago. I continue to be fascinated by ideas that explore the passage of time. Called Seasons, the piece comprises 12 paintings, 30 x 40 cm, acrylic on paper. An experimental series, each piece started out exactly the same, or as near as I could get it, given that they are paintings.
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March
Each successive piece was added to in the same way until I reached the final, twelfth painting. The paintings each represent one month of a year and are a result of careful observation of colour and light levels. NP&F have produced some superb photographs of each painting and I am really looking forward to going back in a few days to look at the proofs before we go ahead and produce a short edition of ten of each painting. I plan to have two full sets available, and the rest can be sold separately. The point of this exercise, because I would not as a rule produce prints of my paintings, is that I cannot sell any individual paintings from the originals as they collectively comprise one piece of work.
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September
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