June

From the suite of prints available during North Yorkshire Open Studios, here is June:

There are twelve prints available, one for each month of the year, £85 each, a very limited edition only.

All rights reserved.

NYOS 15 Weekend number one

Putting out the publicity leaflets for other artists in the vicinity, just before the event began.

Saturday 6th June, day one.  The wind was blowing a gale, quickly knocking our big parasol over, so we folded it away and braved the wind and sunshine outside when we could!

Thank you to all the lovely visitors who made the effort to visit.  Your interest in my work and the lovely conversations are very much appreciated and make all the effort worth while.

The total number of visitors on Saturday was 52 - a big increase on last year!  Fewer came on Sunday; a total of 21 and just as valued. All in all it was a most enjoyable weekend, the sale of a small piece on paper, the icing on the proverbial cake! 

Drawing materials for visiting children

http://www.nyos.org.uk/

All rights reserved.

Time is short!

It's nearly upon us!  This coming weekend, June 6/7th and the following one, June 13/14th, 10.30am - 5.30pm North Yorkshire Open Studios takes place.  My studio at Stonegrave will be open and I am going to show a wide variety of work.

The prints of my series, Laminar Flow (seasons), are ready and mounted and I have just four of the original paintings to put back into their frames, ready for hanging on the wall. The other two walls will show a smaller series of works that I made last year and a couple of larger drawings.  There will be pieces in my browser, other works stacked up for you to look at and a slide show of how the Laminar Flow series developed.

The prints are a very limited edition, with two complete sets of twelve, so you will need to be quick if you want any!

Here's a taster:

Laminar Flow (March) 30 x 40 cm plus mount. Archive ink on art paper.

Laminar Flow (June) 30 x 40 cm plus mount.  Archive ink on art paper.

Laminar Flow (September) 30 x 40 cm plus mount.  Archive ink on paper.

Laminar Flow (December) 30 x 40 cm plus mount.  Archive ink on paper

Some of the smaller works:

Connect, mixed media on board,25.5 x 25.5 cm, framed.  

Song, mixed media on board, 25.5 x 25.5 cm, framed.

Rhythms, mixed media on board, 25.5 x 25.5 cm, framed.

All are welcome, including children; I have a pot of crayons and some paper for them to make their own drawings, so bring along your family and friends, chat to me about my work and enjoy a cup of tea or coffee and home made biscuits.  Have a good browse and who knows, you might go home with a lovely new piece of art for your walls or a gift for a special friend!

I look forward to seeing you.

Sue

Looking forward

I've been ill with a kidney infection, not nice but the antibiotics have sorted me out and the sun is streaming into the house today making me feel much better and giving me the energy to start tackling the tasks I have been unable to do.

There is a lot of work going on towards the Rally for a frack free Ryedale  on 25th April in Malton. I am very behind with making the banners and placards but think I'll manage to get them all done next week.  Plus cakes, always we have cake!

http://www.nyos.org.uk/

My entry can be found here: http://www.nyos.org.uk/Artists-Makers.aspx?&fR=64&nR=114

My studio has been very neglected so far this year; I have managed to reorganise and tidy it ready for when I have time to get out there and make work.  At least it is ready for North Yorkshire Open Studios.  I am really looking forward to it this year because Jenny Pepper http://www.jennypepper.com/ is opening her studio up as well, so it will make our venue really worth visiting with two artists on site and of course, cake!

I am feeling a bit desperate about studio work; missing the routine of it, especially as this was going to be the year where I concentrate on that as my major activity.  Unfortunately my work with Frack Free Ryedale and Frack Free Kirby Misperton has taken up lots of time, energy and head space, which leaves me in the wrong frame of mind for my own work.  Still, once the rally is over I hope to be able to concentrate again.

 From this:

Studio clear up, from the left over chaos of last year to a reorganised space ready for work and NYOS 15.

To this!

I have finally taken the plunge and having a series of works on paper reproduced using giclee printing.  As a rule, I don't like doing this but these twelve pieces make up one work and to sell one of the originals would destroy it.  Therefor I am very excited to say that thanks to Ian Mitchell's recommendation, http://www.ianmitchellart.com/, I am happy to be working with Norton Print and Frame, http://www.fineart.co.uk/directory/fruit-art-ltd_100032.aspx?DirectorySearchPageId=5, who are excellent.  I will be going to check the proofs on Tuesday and then will give the go ahead for a limited print run of each.  

The series, called Laminar Flow,  is one that was made as an experiment; I wanted to try and express what each season feels like and how they form a whole cycle and to do this, I made twelve pieces, acrylic on paper.  Each painting started out the same or as near the same as hand made paintings can be, and then each successive painting had one more layer added, equally as identical as I could make them. The twelfth painting is therefor much thicker and heavier than the last.  There is one painting for each month of the year; my concerns about the passing of time and memory reflected in each. These were made a few years ago, have been in a local pub for a year and generally forgotten about until I had them home again and realised that they were too good to be stuck on the storage rack.  I'd be happy to sell the piece as a whole but devastated to break them up, hence the giclees.

Here is April:

My plan is to have one or two complete set of prints for sale packaged in archive boxes and then the others available as individual prints.  I may even have packs of cards made, but not sure yet.

Please feel free to leave a comment, I hope you enjoy reading my blog.

All rights reserved.

March ends - an update

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

All rights reserved

Ballot box battle

I have been battling with finding time to complete this work.  I keep being distracted by the anti fracking campaign in this area where I live; we are on the front line of the fracking attack here and it is very, very worrying.  I am trying hard to keep positive by doing positive things to help the cause, but it is extremely draining on my mental strength, which is not conducive to my creative production!

However: I am excited!

I have no idea how long the piece actually is; several people have asked me, so I suppose I should attempt to measure it before it is completed because I expect more people will ask the same question.  It is not a piece of purist printmaking; rather the visual version of a room filled with talk, the talk all being about the nature and importance of democracy and voting. As I have progressed with the piece, I have found more and more information that relates to the subject, which there is not really room to include, but which I will include in some of the single pieces I am going to make, and the artists' books.  It would actually be quite nice to do some paintings too, to see how the ideas translate into richly surfaced pieces.

I worked on the piece again for a day last week; there were gaps that I wanted to address; some gaps are OK; causing "pauses" in the conversation but other areas were crying out for more coverage.  I am very pleased with the Thermofax screens; they are so easy to use and made reproducing my hand drawn tally blocks and the printed quotes very easy.

The mix of mono, collograph, lino and screen print within the piece works too; the balance between the hand drawn aspects of the mono printing and the rest is particularly interesting to me.  

This shot above shows the ballot box work and some experiments I have made on wider pieces of paper, I love the translucency of the Chinese paper and its strength.
At one stage, because the work is so long and I was trying to identify the areas that needed more work, I was printing with the work on my left in folds on the floor while on the right, it was held up and draped on my wooden clothes airer.  I had to be very careful not to trip up! See for yourself:

Thanks to all of you who take the time to read this and as always, I welcome your comments.

All rights reserved

Democracy Rocks!

I've been mulling over and working on ideas for the Democracy Rocks project since last year.  Most of the mulling began early last year, some sketches and notes added to this during December and in January I finally began work.

Background:
Our Creative Economies Officer Yvette Turnbull at Ryedale District council was quick to commandeer all the decommissioned ballot boxes, seeing the potential for an exhibition to promote the importance of voting and democracy.  The project involves individual artists of which I am one, as well as groups of young people working with artists.

My concept for the piece was always a very long piece of work emerging from the posting slot of the ballot box.  I initially thought the slit would be much wider than it actually is.  This meant that I had to have a very narrow strip of paper emerging from the box.  Not much wider than a standard loo roll in fact. . . . 

Rather than find this a disappointment, I began to enjoy the analogy of politics and shit!  The old dualist ideas that have gripped me in one way or another since college days began to resurface once again; we have our feet on the ground, in the mud and shit, but we aspire to the stars, to something better and more wondrous.  I think this applies to politicians; I am sure they start out with genuine plans to make things better from their starting point in the mud, aspiring to make things infinitely better but they all seem to flounder at one stage or another.  I don't think it is always their fault; there are bigger, more powerful and greedy forces at work to thwart their good intentions.

I believe in voting; women died and suffered extreme pain in prisons, emotional stress and personal hardship during and after their fight to secure me the right to vote.  There is still a long way to go; I find lots of men still find it difficult to accept that I have a brain and opinions, they accuse me of being aggressive, when all I am actually being is articulate and passionate.  I once challenged a man who told me not to be so aggressive, asking him if he would have said it to a man who voiced the exact same opinion as I had just done.  After a few seconds, to give him his due, he admitted that he probably would not!  HAH!

My piece is called The Mud and the Sheen; reference to a quote from a TJ Clark essay I studied years ago; I'll find the exact reference and post it when I do.  The title reflects all of what I have just said, it is about our human condition, about striving for better, failing and trying again.  Repetition, counting, lists, words, joy, engaging with life. . . . . and the importance of voting!

The piece incorporates, collagraph, lino and mono printing so far and I'll be adding silk screened quotes and definitions relating to democracy and tally marks soon.  Plus anything else I feel like!

Text, art work and photos, Sue Gough.  All rights reserved