It is that time of year again and boosted by the successes last year I decided to give the Summer Exhibition another go. I entered one piece – a Screenprint of my great hero Leonard Cohen who sadly died in 2016. I feel like he sang the refrain to most of my adolescent years – deliciously depressing, haunting lyrics – no matter that they mostly didn’t make sense! Most of his songs are etched in my memory and he would definitely be on my Desert Island choice. So, the Summer Exhibition, like most of the big competitions nowadays, has a first submission by email. They have around 13000 entries which is astonishing, and they weed that down to 4000 for the next round, when you have to take the actual picture up to London. The final hang is about 800. I have just received notification that I am through the first round – yea!!! great excitement. So I have delivered the pic to the RA and await to hear if I make it through. Watch this space.

Meantime Oxfordshire Artweeks is coming up in a week and I am exhibiting with Emma Ablitt again in Longcot which should be fun. We are in a new venue, the Old Methodist Chapel, which is not the easiest space to manage so a bit of a challenge. But it is always an enjoyable week, meeting lots of people, talking about what we are doing and, hopefully selling some pieces as well. I shall have screen prints, linocuts and some carvings to show, plus a few photos from my New York trip – a bit of an eclectic mix to give a flavour of what I have been up to in the year. We will be open every day from 11-18 May so I hope to see some of you there!

publicity for October Exhibition at CIrencester

Well, it has been quite a summer with a great deal going on, not much of which has allowed me precious time in my studio.  Bits of work have gone into various exhibitions, most recently been Oxford Art Society’s show in September.  However, now Emma and I are gearing up for our Pop Up exhibition in Cirencester which we hang on Monday.  I am at the stage of making lists and gathering heaps of things I must remember to take.  This should be a new audience for us so it will be interesting to see how we are received.  We have to man this one ourselves so have divided up the two weeks between us – anyone wanting to come and see one of us, please get in touch to find out who will be there which days.  Wish us luck!

‘Bluebird’ card

‘Love’ card

I have just noticed that I have let the ‘Exhibitions’ corner on the front page slip badly so now it looks like I haven’t had an exhibition for the last three years!  Holy moly!  Now I have to try and remember what happened where and when and stick them all in…it may happen or it may not…

…in the meantime I have updated the Gallery with some of the new work I have been doing so check it out – especially the Monoprints section which has some new fruity numbers using a new technique I have been playing with involving printing onto tissue shapes and then using them to print onto wet paper.  It gives a lovely clean edge and some wonderful textures.  If you would like more info then ask;  I have started explaining how to do it to people and watched their eyes glaze over so now I wait till I am asked!

Also, a new departure for me: I have been asked by a Gallery locally to do some Linoprint Workshops so I will start those in August.  I am really looking forward to doing them: I have put a maximum of 6 people just to start with, while I work out how many rollers and tubes of ink I will need.  I hope sufficient people sign up and aren’t put off by the fact they did linoprint at school.  It is such a simple medium but with heaps of scope to experiment and is great fun.  I made quite a lot of linoprinted cards for the Open Studios event in May and printed them onto some hand marbled paper I happened to have – they worked beautifully adding a layer of colour and interest behind the print.

And finally I have just enrolled with West Dean in Sussex to learn how to do paper marbling myself – a bit of a treat.  Lovely!

So, at the weekend I had a proper lesson in Twitter and how it all works. Finally I think I am understanding the point and I tweeted today about an amazing double exhibition that is happening at Bristol RWA which I have booked to visit at the end of March. It is my two favourite things at the mo, Ravilious – whose work is kind of familiar from his designs for Wedgewood etc and who sums up a whole decade in terms of his style and particularly the colours he uses – and then One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography. Recently in London there were two very good exhibitions which particularly covered the work of Rene Gras, and some of his contemporaries. There is something quite lovely about fashion iconography in terms of capturing the flavour of an era. So two exhibitions on at the same time which promise great things. And, on the back of that enthusiasm, i have had my first retweet…I think I am getting the hang of this.