Dear followers,

This blog post will whet your pre festive season appetites and give you some updates about when and where I will be trading. If you can pop along it would be lovely to see you.

I am just about to raise my weary head from a period of covid bedroom banishment……..I feel a bit like the groundhog coming out to potentially warn of more impending winter or not. What an odd 10 or so days it has been.

Now, as I eagerly approach my final 24h period of isolation, it will be a thrill I can tell you just to go for a walk, let alone go to work and physically chat with more than 1 person at a time, what a novelty! I have some serious Christmas magazines to source……its my one seasonal whim and fancy and indulge it I must & will……

Now then what news……..the exhibition at The Bankside Gallery came and went and I didn’t even get to see my work on its walls, though my wonderful printmaking posse did go along and took some snaps for me. Thanks ladies, you are my champions.

Now then, upcoming Christmas fairs……I will be trading at the BOS Xmas Fair at St Peter’s Church, Wickham Road, SE4 1LT, on Saturday 27th November from 12-4 pm.

All of the following makers will be there - pop the date in your diaries and lets kick off this yuletide season!

A few weeks later I will be trading at Pexmas, on Sunday 12th December - see the flyer below……11 - 6 pm in the fabulous Copeland Gallery. All those gifts……..sorted! And what’s more, the emphasis is on sustainability and a green attitude, so all of my packaging and that of fellow makers will be completely plastic free……..my acid free protective films on all of my prints is made from corn & potato starch, washi tape, which is completely compostable and tissue paper packaging, even my labels are biodegradable.

Come along & support your local creative community whilst sourcing unique handmade gifts, with Christmassy tunes and festive fare & tipples to really get you in the mood!

I will be showing some new smaller works and cards etc……..it hasn’t been easy losing the last fortnight as I haven’t been able to make anything and I had to cancel studio screen print sessions, however, I do know that it’s amazing what can be achieved when push comes to shove and my energy levels are coming back up!

Before I was poorly, I did manage to book tickets to see Helen Frankenthaler’s show ‘Radical Beauty’ with my best friend, a fellow artist, painter. I had an inkling that she would get as much out of the show as me, as Helen was primarily a painter, yet she almost stumbled in to printmaking and the woodcuts on show at The Dulwich Picture Gallery just took my breath away. Needless to say I am now in the process of having a go at woodcuts……..I will see where it may lead. More about that later….

“Exploring Frankenthaler's proofs and processes, we'll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling woodcuts – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”

The Guardian called it the most ‘sublime show of the year’ and I cannot agree more, do go & see it if you can.

‘Slow, determined and infinitely hard-won, the woodcut prints of the late American artist transcend their rigid medium with visions of radiant liberation
The show of the season, if not the year, is a sequence of 36 visions of such overwhelming beauty at The Dulwich Picture Gallery that the urge is to remain there all day. It is like being surrounded by some ever-changing song. Ostensibly abstract, each work nonetheless touches on nature’s infinite sublime – snow pines and green glades, early spring and deep autumn, the curlicued complexities of late crab apples suspended in volumes of pale morning light.

Their soaring radiance is an abiding characteristic of the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), one of the great pioneers of American postwar abstraction. Yet a further astonishment, at Dulwich, is that these are not paintings at all; not canvases stain-soaked with her trademark colour washes, but something else entirely – formidably large woodcuts.’ (Laura Cumming)

Until next time……..as ever I thank you for your time & for your continued support…….