Finding the Balance exhibition Sat 20 April - Sat 18 May 2013

Finding the Balance – exhibition  at Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Saturday 20 April –  Saturday 18 May

An exhibition of lino prints, monotypes, mixed media prints and iPad drawings exploring that elusive balance within your own life and environment

Finding the balance is a life’s project.   On a personal level when dealing with knocks, worries and demands how do you stay calm?  I asked Lilly (aged 4) and she told me that at nursery she does meditation, or as she calls it, ‘Ommm time’.   I like boxercise, working in my garden, stopping to smell the flowers, having an Indian Head massage...

 

Creating work for this exhibition is all part of my attempt at finding my own  balance.  I love printmaking and have used a combination of both traditional methods, that involve using a manual etching press, and digital prints and iPad drawings.

August - Drawing and creating a design for a new lino and monotype

I sat outside in the sun with some graphite water soluble pencils drawing bees and plants and creating a design for a lino print. I had no idea that bees could be such different sizes and colours.  As each bee came my way I drew it until it flew off and drew the next one...

 Having seen this trial print, I plan to cut away more at the bottom, removing the dark green area. Also, need to modify tone on beekeeper's headgear.

Combination of rainbow rolled ink on the perspex, drawing with a brush from memory and with reference to sketches I did outdoors.  Thinking about a possible composition, choice of colours etc.

 

This blog posting was delayed due to problems with the one of the photos - now happily resolved!

Boxercise

I've been looking at the effect of the cutout filter to give an idea of how this could look as a lino print.   Katherine Tyrell (makingamark.blogspot.co.uk) talked about this on her excellent blog some time ago.   It helps get you into the way of thinking when creating images suitable for lino prints.  A' scribbly' free style of drawing is difficult to translate into the areas of tone and, although this isn't now ready to be transferred to lino it does kick start the thinking process.   I'll be re-drawing it and making decisions as I do so.

Do I want this amount of shadow on the faces?   Should I work with just 2 tones or increase this? If so, shall I do a reduction print or a multi-block print? Is the pose too static?   Do I want these figures superimposed/layered over other figures, using transparent medium mixed into the relief ink so that both layers are visible?