Out of the Blue exhibition at the Pie Factory Margate

 

I went down to The Pie Factory on Sunday to see Out of the Blue, an exhibition by Sally Higgs and Deborah Crofts.

The Pie Factory is a really good space, website here in the old town close to the sea and the Turner Contemporary Gallery.

Sally and Deborah have used the space well, filling the rooms with colour. They were both at the gallery when I went along so it was good to talk to them.

Both artists have a love of the sky, clouds and sea, the fleeting moments and changes in light that we have in Britain.  They also both have studios in Folkestone's creative quarter and I was pleased to hear that the area is developing well.

Deborah was showing a range of work including pieces with bold shapes and colour that seem to take a moment and distill it into an essence.
Deborah's website here

Sally's work includes colourful sunsets and sunrises that seem to contain the light and release it. Some more of Sally's work here

I really enjoyed looking at the work and meeting other artists who are interested in the same subject matters as I am.

The exhibition is on till 26th March 10-4pm and there is an opportunity to make a postcard picture yourself to add to the wall during the exhibition.

Margate in the Mist and Gwen Ramsay's Exhibition

Last Sunday after a scorching hot week Margate was filled with sea mist. I could taste the salt in the damp air in the garden and the light was diffused and pale.

I went down to the sea and the Harbour Arm appreciating the change in perception that the mist brought. It was like seeing through a very fine veil.

People were still on the beach and swimming in the sea, not as many as had been but still making the most of the day. I enjoyed looking out across the pale aqua sea to the horizon now wreathed in mist.

I had gone down to see the latest exhibition in the Harbour Arm gallery.  The artist Gwen Ramsay was showing a range of paintings there. Her website here

I was drawn to her still figures in water,one called Night Swimming showed a female figure with her arms crossed in front of her, looking as though she was gently rising through the water which was full of stars.

There was another female and male figure with their heads just above the sea which

also had this very still quality which reminded me of the stillness in meditation.

One wall was full of small paintings of magnolia flowers in various shades of colour. They conveyed a sense of botanical collections. And the studies botanists made on their plant hunting trips.

I really enjoyed seeing the work which was in the very lovely small gallery on the Harbour Arm, with views out onto the harbour and sea front.

New Paintings and exhibitions

I've been working hard on a series of new paintings for some exhibitions comimg up in the Autumn with some friends of mine. The top painting is called Landscape of Ancient Dreams. It's an acrylic on board and I'm pleased with the colours of the acrylics and the glow of all those moons!

Often in this form of painting my process is highly intuitive, I don't ask many questions of myself and just let things arrive in the picture at first. Later I will spend quite a long time just looking at the work and seeing if all the elements work together, if more aspects need to be added or changed and if the colours represent the forms. As I was painting Landscape of Ancient Dreams the moons kept "arriving" on the picture and in fact I had to leave a few out! The symbolism of Egyptian culture, Buddhism and China seemed to want to be part of the landscape, although the land itself is British.

There are the trees that usually inhabit my work and an entrance to an underground tunnel or cave which has the symbols of lotus and moon and star from ancient Egyptian tradition. The tree above the entrance is symbolic of the tree of life and holds the owl as a symbol of wisdom.




The next picture is called Elements of Earth and follows a similar pastel I did of the same subject. In this picture are references to the start of life, the large sun's rays are reaching down and some are actually touching the earth. I have this sense of indistinct shapes in the ground and others like seeds waiting to break into life.
There is a tree of life just to one side whose roots stretch deep into the earth and a spirit of birds hinting at the life in the skies and the sprit of human life.

These and other paintings( I will put on the next blog) will be showing at Fuggles Studio and Gallery near Bridport in Dorset 1st till 28th of September. info about the gallery here

Then at The Atlantis Bookshop Museum street London 17th till 29th October info about Atlantis Bookshop here

Winter Exhibition at Vestry House.

The Waltham Forest Arts Club has a winter exhibition on at the Vestry House Museum at the moment. I have 2 small paintings in there and was invigilating on Sunday.
It's a small space in a quirky local museum, but it is valuable in being one of the few spaces available in the borough to show art work.

There is a range of work on show from video, printmaking, 3D, painting and photography. My paintings are imaginary winter landscapes referencing popular images used at this time of year to sell all sorts of wares. But there is something about these sorts of landscapes that appeals to me and others I presume. Perhaps something about the wildness or remoteness of these spaces and the sense of an idyllic place somewhere that we might visit.

Katja was showing a Memory Game using a number of artists images reflecting on the borough

Julie caves is showing a beautifully coloured painting Twilight Pauline Evans ceramic piece Lyme Avenue made me smile and DNA Dilemma an installation by Anna Spain was intriguing.

Wonderland exhibition and Artist Book Fair

Saturday morning was the start of the East London Printmakers exhibition Wonderland, at The Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green info here. Katja and Jean and other artists I knew from our group shows had work in it and it is an impressive exhibition. Nicola Green and Zairo Zaldua had an installation called My Childhood Faith, incorporating faded old family photographs and boxes, giving a sense of a private world of childhood and beyond. One of Nicola's relatives was there and pointed out some of the people she knew from the old photos.
Kim Jenkins had a piece called Real Boy illustrating the story of Pinocchio, I enjoyed the whimsical feel and the sense that Pinocchio could be a real boy.
Richard Robert's silksceen the phrase," And if they haven't died,then they still live today" stayed with me as a thought.

Other work that caught my eye on this first viewing included Janet Patterson's installation "Jack and the Beanstalk" A tower of boxes printed with the beanstalk, the boxes containing the secrets of the story. And Jean Gibbon's "Storm on Lake Superior" woodcuts with a lovely sense of colour and depth.



It was very busy at the opening, dress up clothes provided for the children and coffee, tea and biscuits for the adults. I will definitely go back again for a closer look. The exhibition runs until the 10th January and there are workshops and events associated with it.

Later I went down to the Whitechapel gallery for the London Artists books Fair. I hadn't managed to get to the Whitechapel since it's redevelopment, so it was interesting to see the extended space. I had thought there may be some art work on show as well as the book fair, but there wasn't as far as I could see.
The book fair was worth the visit, even though there were quite a few mainstream publishers showing books, there were also a good number of individual book artists there too. My tutor at the Mary Ward Centre, Ciara Healy had a stand with some lovely books info here
Anne Rook, who I also met at Ciara's class was there too using her quirky apple images that I really like. Anne's site hereUpstairs were some books that moved into sculptural forms, including work by Richard Long and Anish Kapoor's wound.

E17 Art Trail part 3

I was in the Central library in Walthamstow for the artists books event with Laura yesterday. It was great to see Laura's collection of artists books, I added a few myself and we put out the collection on tables for people to browse through.

We also had a good selection of materials for people if they wanted to try making a simple book themselves. Although we didn't get a huge amount of people passing through, we did have some good conversations with people and some people tried their hands at making books. I found more ideas for books to make myself and really liked the artists book as sculpture, a ball of twisted newspaper twine with some tags of print left on that Julian Beere brought in. Julien's blog here

In the library itself were a number of small exhibitions, Dan Green's The Frozen Lake, was a series of winter landscapes taken in the cold winter earlier in the year. They were atmospheric images, the sun low in the sky and the sense of cold palpable. The lakes had a quality of stillness and other worldliness.

Ron Bowman has a show of his watercolours in the main entrance, he is a photographer more recently moving into watercolours. Neon Nature, Jakie Whalen's paintings in the main library held their own in the busy space. Her designs and bright colours were being enjoyed by the visitors.

There was a range of photographs from the Walthamstow & district Photographic Society in the corridors, and With my love of birds I was taken by the great photo of a Jay facing a squirrel on a bird table by Trevor Weatherley. Peter Tomlinson was also showing a series of portraits, Lochkamera Portraits, exploring the use of a lensless camera. The images were soft and had a subtle quality of colours and they invited you in for a closer look.

Animation Breakdown, Tate Modern

Tate Modern held an Animation Breakdown weekend this week and I was able to get along to part of yesterdays study day. I was interested in seeing the possible range of work that's being done by contemporary artists, in digital media, following my own interest in video.
So it was great to see a lot of different work and hear from some of the artists during panel discussions. Simon Faithfull showed some work made using palm pilot drawings on a trip to the source of the river Lea. He also showed a tribute, little animation of a dog who had died but through the work was re-animated. Under an Arts Council funding Simon had also gone to Antartica with a research team and sent back a drawing a day by e-mail.

I was interested in his work because it shared similarities with mine and he used animation in small amounts.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jennifer Steinkamp showed examples of her completely computer generated work, which is large scale and based and involving architectural forms. Samba Falls work questions the nature of identity and self, with an opening striking image of a skeleton lying above a barcode.

Animate Projects has many films to watch, news, events and a blog.

In the Tubine Hall was Dominique Gonzalez-Foersters installation TH.2058 looking into an imaginary future in London 50 years from now, when we will be seeking shelter from the continuous rain.There was something menacing about the spider like creature and the bare bed frames, which had some books treated for the expected damp.The giant apple core is by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje von Bruggen.


Outside the sun was still shining and I took some photographs of the silver birch trees, growing taller each year.

Exhibitions and Leytonstone car free day

After the inspired by William Morris exhibition, I have a painting in The annual Arts Club exhibition at the Changing room Gallery. It is a painting of an angel, the "Angel of Dusk Lunden "




After painting in acrylic for a while, I had forgotten how long oil paints take to dry! and my painting was still slightly tacky 5 days after I'd stopped painting. I am using the new water mixable oil paints from Winsor and Newton and I am pleased with them. There is very little smell to them, the texture is like traditional oils and It means I can paint in my flat with them now.

Last weekend was the Leytonstone car free day, I hadn't been for a couple of years, and the event had grown, there were a lot of stalls up and down the roads near the tube station, a french market ( where I had gone to look for a particular soap) and lots of childrens activities.

Cy Twombly and Network of Buddhist organisations exhibition

I went to visit the Cy Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern a few days ago. Surprisingly it wasn't very busy for the opening week, but perhaps it's because he is not a household name. For me looking at a lot of the canvases I thought there was something of a dairy feel to the work. Something about recording a particular place or time with words, signs and symbols, emotion and thought.
Although some of the work was concerned with the colour white,( the symbolic whiteness of the poet Stephane mallarme ) colour was also applied by hand and fingers in other paintings, great dollops of paint, drips and smears. Underneath and on top, notation, writings that could sometimes be seen but were often hidden or undecipherable.



It's always good to leave an exhibition with the desire to make work yourself, and with the Cy Twombly exhibition I left thinking about my artists books and a book or page the same sizes as some of his canvases.

Four of my Buddhist works, including this one, Guardians of the Blue Planet, have been down to a conference organised by the Network of Buddhist Organisations and hosted by The Institute of Oriental Philosophy at Taplow Court.
It was an opportunity for artists who are also Buddhist to show their work. I am looking forward to hearing people's responses to the work.