Froxfield winter exhibition

I'm glad to say I finished the teasel woodcuts in time to include them in our winter show. 

This was a good thing, because the blue and brown combo was the first print to sell.

Here we are (the fabulous four!) just before opening the doors to our visitors. Me, trying to hide behind Normandy, Arran and Lorraine.

A big thank you to everyone who dropped by.

We had a good time this weekend. Visitors numbers somewhere between 250 and 300, more than in previous years, and our Saturday evening party was buzzy and great fun. 

Our village hall scrubs up nicely for the exhibition. Hungerford Camera Club loans out the screens to us, and I think the black shows the work surprisingly well.

This shot shows some of my work and my ongoing preoccupation with landscape. 

Arran's work, you can see she's a very adept painter.

Normandy's work, this year showing his new 'Drip' paintings.

And, a passionate photographer, Lorraine's work shows a great variety of subject matter.

Last minute linocut!!

I decided yesterday to make a new linocut, we hold our winter show this weekend and I don't think I have enough new work. Arrrrrrrrgh.

Over the years I've collected various dried seed heads and bits of interesting looking plant material, which I keep in the shed. From time to time I make thumbnail sketches so I enlarged one of those and got to work.

As I work I change colours. 

Keeping the background colour the same or similar throughout and over printing with cool colours or warm colours changes the mood of a print. Each becoming different from the rest.

I pushed on and printed three colours today, they'll have a bit of time to dry tomorrow when I'm invigilating at New View the BANA Arts annual show, and I can finish them on Thursday.

Block printing with linocut

We need new curtains for our snug and I've been toying with the idea of printing my own design. But it's an awful long time since I printed any textiles which means I'll need to do plenty of experimentation - this is good, it will be fun to play around for a bit. 

We also need a very small blind for the downstairs loo, so that's what I'll start with. That way I only need to print a couple of metres of cloth as apposed to printing about 12!

I don't have easy access to screen printing equipment and studio so I went back to my roots and played around with some simple block printing onto cloth. 

I used existing bits of lino because I wanted to experiment with the technique but once I feel I've mastered that, I'll work out a design and make the plates specifically for this project. It will give me the perfect excuse to get my old textile books down from the shelf and pay the V&A a visit.

By inking each plate individually you can achieve really 'clean' shapes, then printing onto paper or cloth the ideas start to form and I can see how printing 12 metres is possible!

I think I've just found a new use for our kitchen table, hurrah!

Froxfield Winter Show

As the year turns full circle it's time again for our Winter exhibition and last week I collected 1000 invites.

Almost all of them are now distributed so Arran, Lorraine, Normandy and me are all keeping our fingers crossed that both old and new friends drop by to say hello, look at our recent work and join us for a glass of wine on either the 26th or 27th November.