INK AND STEEL

I have a revised date for my exhibition, which is now due to be held at Wolverhampton Central Library from Tuesday 22nd November until Saturday 10th December 2011.

The library has been undergoing extensive refurbishment over the past year, and will have to close on Monday 21 November for electrical tests. Unfortunately for me this is the first day of my exhibition. Hopefully all should be well and I should be putting my exhibition up early on Tuesday morning.

Fingers crossed!

I've set a date for my small exhibition. It will begin on Monday 21 November and end on Saturday 10th December 2011. As the exhibition will be in 2 glass cases on the first floor of the library, I'm hoping to use the split in order to theme my exhibition around firstly current work, and secondly, as a kind of retrospective of how my pen and ink work has developed over the past 10 years. Looking back at my older pieces now I had forgotten how small I began back in 2000, when my work was then mainly done in A5 sketchbooks. They seemed to take forever to do, and the nibs I used were the finest kind, I didn't begin to use a variety of nibs until 2005 when I began to experiment with larger pieces.

Those early drawings, like this exhibition, were exercises in self-confidence building. I find that confidence is like the weather; changeable and subject to uncontrollable circumstances. The mind, like meteorological forces, is unpredictable and sensitive.

Meanwhile the rain beats desultory time on our neighbour’s conservatory. My bookmark marches in sad fascination through Douglas Botting's biography of Gavin Maxwell. It's a strange biography - both sympathetic, admiring, and at the same time it never flinches from baring the man warts and all. I'm three quarter's through it, hooked. I know it ends badly, but I can't stop reading.

Plans

I'm planning a small exhibition of my artwork at the library where I work. The library is a Carnegie library, a beautiful building with a particularly striking entrance hall where a marble staircase spirals gracefully up to the first floor and the imposing double glass cases which people can hire (for free). I've seen all kinds of things exhibited here, from displays of local artists' work and photography groups, to origami and collectable cigarette cards.

I can never resist looking up every time I climb the stairs to the first floor, because the domed ceiling with its round skylight is wonderful. Wolverhampton Central library is a gem of a building.


Anyway, I'm hopefully putting together a small exhibition of my artwork in these cases, later this year all being well, when the extensive work that's been going on at the library since last November is finally completed. I've begun by planning out the space, as I hope to present my pieces mounted but not framed. I've begun doing this by measuring out with string an equivalent space to the glass cases in the back garden, then laying out sheets of paper cut roughly to the size of my drawings within them.


I know this looks eccentric, but it helps me work out whether I've got enough pieces to fill the cases. The left hand case is going to be my most recent work, basically themed around my most recent exploration of a motif - trees. The right hand case is older work, with exception of the furthest right hand piece, which will be my as yet unfinished drawing Frou Frou. The older work pretty much represents the last 10 years of my visual artwork. I will exhibit the smallest pieces, which were the first drawings I made when I began to practice my visual art again, about 10 years ago now.

I'm hoping to approach this small thing as profesionally as possible. Hope nothing goes wrong. Fingers crossed.

PATCHINGS

I went to see the Patchings Exhibition on Sunday. The art centre is in a lovely spot in a rural situation just outside the sprawl of Nottingham. According to the history that is printed on the back of the menu in the homely cafe the arts centre is a family venture and it's been in existance for about 20 years. As well as exhibition and studio facilities, it offers workshops and courses and you can hire the cafe for functions. We had Sunday dinner in the cafe, which has more of a cosy restuarant feel with a good selection of home made food. Vegetarians have three main options, and I chose the vegetarian wholemeal pie. It's table service, and a hefty quarter slice was promptly delivered, followed by, to my surprise, a dish of swede and mashed potato, a dish of carrots and cabbage and a pot of peas. All this for £6.75. Excellent value.

The Artists and Leisure Painter exhibitions are exhibited in two separated spaces, the Leisure Painter exhibition is in a small gallery adjoining a nice craft shop (The Crew Yard Gallery), the walls are a little bit crammed in here, but there are some nice things on show. I particularly liked the two Meditteranean landscapes, High Rise by Peter Dudley and Summer in the Andalucia by Maureen Haslam both of which I think could have easily been in the Artists Exhibition. This was held in the more spacious Barn Gallery just above the restaurant. There were some lovely pieces here, everything to a very high standard (I think I was extremely lucky to have my pieces exhibited here, I couldn't help feeling that I just scraped in by the skin of my teeth), the standard of framing and presentation was outstanding, my poor little shop bought frames looked very undistinguished by comparison. There were two lovely (and immacuatly presented) flower paintings by Mary Rogers, a beautiful, ssubtly rendered oil painting by Chris Daynes, a stunning and immaculate flower drawing in coloured pencil by Claire Milligan and a nice composite piece called Six in One Frame, Nudes, Collias by Richard Parkinson. There were a couple of extremely vivid paintings by Jan Gardner that really caught my eye, the reproduction on the Patchings website doesn't really do her work justice, I was particularly mesmerised by On the trail with its wash of sensuous colour, the contrasting pastel lines and the squiggle of pen and ink detail that drew me closer to the surface of this fascinating and hypnotic work. You can see more of Jan Gardner's work on her website a very colourful and energising place to visit.



One of Mary Rogers' paintings was of the Kiftsgate Rose, and co-incidentally on Saturday my friend and I visited Kiftsgate Court Gardens, a lovely private garden next door to Hidcote Manor Gardens. Kiftsgate is a lovely garden, with a small formal garden built around the house and a path decending through Scotch Pines to a crescent shaped swimming pool and a view across neighbouring fields. We sat for a while watching a poor lost sheep bleeting its heart out as it tried to find the rest of its flock.


My favourite thing of all at Kiftsgate though is the lovely water garden, stepping across onto the island and waiting for the water to start trickling from the gold leaves, losing yourself for a moment watching the pond scaters and newts in the pond, it's one of those places where adults become children again for a short time. Such a peaceful, magical spot.

Perfectible...

Art (drawing, painting) was a huge part of my early life. I have a degree in Graphic Design (specialised in illustration) from the then City of Birmingham Polytechnic, but I always wrote as well, and this has been the form my creativity has taken over the years.

From time to time I get the urge to do something visual though, often it's tied into the seasonal creativity thing - i.e. at certain times of the year I get specific creative urges, the times when I'm most likely to have the visual urge is spring, and autumn. The obvious reason for this being that simply, I love the transitional seasons - right now I love trees in a blaze of colour, and the strange fungi that are bursting through the mulch of leaves and moss and fallen seeds, nuts and seed pods, these natural phenomenom I find so inspiring. Mostly lately I appease my urge to capture something visually (to capture the moment, to understand something about my own interaction with the world, a childlike interaction that I hope I will never lose) by digital photography. I feel guilty though that I allow my artistic skills, mostly drawing, to atrophy, though the main reason for this is a practical one - there simply isn't the time to do EVERYTHING, to write poetry, to write fiction, to slog at getting these published (to deal with the failure when I don't - dealing with failure is EXTREMELY time consuming) and to express myself visually as well.

I tend to work visually off and on, exhibiting occasionally, mostly at one of the annual RBSA open exhibitions. Still, I'm aware at the moment that I need to pack my life with creativity in order to keep my 'spark' going, and this blog is part of my strategy of doing this.

I'll explain, later...