September
September. The beginning of Autumn, my favourite season. Mizzle, dew, spiders webs across the pathways, fruits to harvest and chutneys and jams to make.
I have made the decision to stop fretting about making more new work for my upcoming solo show in York next month. My 'Seasons' series will look great on the newly painted gallery walls and I have picked a large painting on paper to go in the window. Job done, feeling much less stressed now. When I do get some time, I will go out to the studio and work on the two large paintings I started some weeks ago and finish off the artists' books I have printed.
Meanwhile, I have embarked on a mammoth chutney making session; I am running a fundraiser bottle and jar stall for frack free in just over a week's time; so far I have made Autumn tomato chutney using my windfall cooking apples and some tomatoes I got at a reasonable price in a local shop. There are vegetables soaking in brine as I write, waiting to be made into pear and ginger Piccalilli tomorrow and I will harvest apples and plums from the garden for more chutneys and possibly some jam. Sloe gin, matured for more than two years will also be bottled up (in small bottles, I don't want to give it all away!). Along with contributions from other people, it should be a successful stall. It's strange to be talking about domestic things here; but that's what my life is at the moment.
October
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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.
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.
September
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