Palace Art Fair

The studio has once again become populated by work on every horizontal surface drying between marks made and glazes. In anticipating of the Palace Art Fair.

Informed by the conversations I had at Brighton Art Fair, the work is responding to my reactions to the visitors feedback. To the allusion of depth my richly layered work plays with and the spartan qualities of the reductive work. Where marks are made and worked towards erasing them, leaving but a trace of the ghost like original or an archeology of my mark making process.

I will be present on Stand 9 at Fulham Palace from the 8th- 10th October. I look forward to seeing you on stand.

Brighton Art Fair 2010

Brighton Art Fair 2010 is over...

Thanks go out to Jon, Sarah, Anne-Marie and their team for ensuring another successful event.

It was a chance for me to show the larger work that has been percolating in the studio over the summer and to have the ever valuable conversations with fellow exhibitors and to engage with visitors. The fair was rammed at the Private View, with a 'one in; one out' policy operating on the door and work seemed to really shift from the hall over the three days.

For me it was a great weekend, sales and commissions were up and was good seeing previous buyers and new folk step up to the stand and comment on the new developments. I am encouraged to get back to the studio to complete and start replacement work ready for Palace Art Fair in three weeks. See you there!

The Wood Shed!

Tight for space in the studio, with work drying on every horizontal surface, I am forced into the wood shed to glaze and finish the last couple of pieces for next week.

I am on target to complete all work by Sunday and photograph it on Monday. Ready for a NEW Gallery page to be loaded on Dawlton Barn website to coincide with the Private View on Thursday in Brighton. Keep an eye on the site for new completed work!

All work seen on this blog and my website are for sale or approach me to see more work or to talk about the commissioning process.

Planning the Stand!

Taking a break from the surrounds and smell of the studio, I pour myself a glass of wine and sketch out to reasonable scale my thoughts towards the layout of Stand 2 at Brighton Art Fair next Thursday. Taking a mix of my new large work and familiar small delights, that are my studio obsessional pieces, it is reassuring that keeping a uniformity of size enables the shifting of a variety of squares around fixed walls easier than irregularity.

A partial premature delight in curation comes when the pinning and moving and re-pinning of thumbnail computer prints upon and around a cardboard model starts to bring a cohesion and dialogue to this year's work (not showing you an image of that, you will have to come to the Corn Exchange over the weekend to see).

Sketches

Strewn across the studio floor are what have become sketches, studies and experiments on paper. The immediacy of committing to paper is extraordinarily liberating for a someone so engaged in the process of constructing my usual surfaces of panel, french linen and the obsessive many layers of hand-made gesso. I can go: "straight to it", with less investment in the surface I am less precious about the marks I make.

The sketches are stand alone pieces and also inform the work ongoing. I am mindful to take the lessons from working on paper and am also drawn to think about... 'what if I made my own paper?'

Something I have not done for many years since constructing paper pulp sculptures in Sheffield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Off to research how I might do this again. But it will have to wait until after Brighton. ONLY 8 days to go!

Tondos

Round paintings. Any comments??

Apologies for quality of images, posted from iPhone

Developments...

Studio work can often feel like one step forward and two steps back, seduced in one direction by the process and 'happy accidents' on the surface it is easy to be hi-jacked by this spontaneous freedom with a loss of intention.

This week I have chosen to reign back a couple of images built up from many layers of ink and glazes, this often incurs the editing back of marks and revisiting the colour ways. Whilst I relish in the ambiguities that my images evoke, there is a point of clarity where I start and where I conclude, the in between is a balance of control and play.