Open Studio Guides Are Here!

South East Open Studio Guides have been printed and distributed via: libraries, tourist information office, arts/craft shops and other venues across the region, also available as a download. If you wish to receive a copy, become a Friend of SEOS here or complete this form and get one in return

I am open for the three weekends and some days in between. For full dates click here. Invites to the Private View available so contact me should you like to come. I am open a couple of late nights to help those looking to take a country drive of an evening and happen across a studio! and refreshments are often uncorked.

I will be demonstrating this year. The processes of mixing gesso, preparing and finishing a surface along with creating my gestural marks upon the ancient recipe. I will release a schedule of the demos and gesso recipe upon request, so mail me.

Look forward to welcoming you in 24 days..... and counting.

New Work

Pairing the palette back to monochrome, once again I am exploring mark upon surface and the crude science of chemical and molecular bond the ink particles make within the protein and carbonate structures of the gesso. Marks penetrate the surface, repetition, over marking to point of initial trace obliteration, only to be revealed in the archeology of removing thin surface layers to uncover and lay bare the raw initial marks of my play.

Tondos bought from Chromos are the new obsessions.

My daily pieces continuing with a sparse brevity of line or colour that have a focussed relevance to my machinations. A little like musings on the back of fag packets or beer mats, when desirous of overcoming a block or planning world peace. It never leaving your mind until you fathom it out on whatever surface, at whatever time, in whatever form; text, scribble, lexicon of symbols or motifs to be enlarged and lived with on a different scale and pushed further with the luxury of time.

Work commitments are looking to end shortly with a return to attending to the journey across the drive to the studio. However I am left questioning a continual conundrum of the preciousness I feel I sometimes place upon the time in the studio, the materials to which I feel wedded and whilst mark making is a fairly new discipline for me; "how quickly I feel I may have become a 'Company Thinker'?"

So I continue with the sketch books, and permit into the mix; iphone images, margin notes from a meeting, questionably random doodles and perhaps a beer mat or two into the enquiry process and aesthetic decisions.

It's HUGE!

Have just taken receipt of a two part architects plans chest form local firm Roger Joyce Associates. Thank you to Roger for bringing it up on Saturday evening in the dark.

The new addition to the studio will provide much needed storage for my drawings and colour studies on stretched linen and gesso. When located in the corner they will also provide much more needed horizontal surfaces and a work area able to take a small printing press where upon I can start dry point etching and collagraphs. Watch this space and flickr for the new work to come from the studio.

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!

Committing to Big!

Having had some studio visits from friends and colleagues recently. I have been reminded of the need to engage with your work as a viewer and not just as the person who makes it. It is easy for thinking to become contained within the 'studio references' and not be wider, bolder, connected, multi-layered and bigger than intention and process.

Imagining myself as a viewer approaching my work, I was challenged to not just give an intimate up close selective experience. But rather ask: 'What if the work was present and greater in scale?' the impact being physical and visceral as well as ocular.

So be it.... I started getting bigger.

The series of 50x 50 cm gesso panels will be taken to Brighton Art Fair along with several 1 metre sqaures. Larger work can be seen in London at the Palace Art Fair in October, where I will have a bigger stand to take the bigger work.

Studio Shots

Work is well underway for Brighton Art Fair in a couple of weeks time. You will be able to find me on Stand 2, just as you enter the Corn Exchange to the left.

I will be showing new work from the daily studio collection (the small 10x10cm ones!) Along with larger work. Watch out for the 1 metre square, the 1.5 metre square and the departure from square format.... a whopping 2 metre x 1 metre panel, stretched French linen and gesso.

I have some spare tickets to the Art Fair, so if you would like to come see the work you have been following on this blog, then drop me an email.

Getting the Studio Ready!

Countdown to Open Studios is upon me!

Those that know me will be unsurprised at the project plan I have in my studio of what needs to be done by when. Colour coded too. The 4th June will soon be upon us all and I am intending to open with new work from the studio collection and my daily pieces.

The small 10x10cm pebeo linen frames I ordered from Chromos in Canterbury arrived and I have been busy applying the gesso (above). This will allow me time to work through while I am open without the smell of rabbit skin glue simmering away and the gesso thickening beyond workable. If anyone wants to see this process drop me a mail and we can arrange. rod@dawltonbarn.co.uk

I will be open the following days & times; 4th-6th June from 11am-6pm, 12th-13th from 11am-6pm and the 17th - 20 June from 11am-8.30pm or by appointment at other times.