our sixth dance .....

Once again Fiona and I have begun a collaborative book.  Life has often intervened this year and we have been less diligent than we were last year.  However, we have already laid our plans for 2014 and set working days aside for our joint projects.

This collaboration is different once again.  It is born out of the prints we each made and swapped for the Maleny Printmakers exhibition last weekend.  We each used nine of our own prints and nine from the other ..... these then form the materials from which we will work to make our books.

Here in the trays at the exhibition you can see our rows of little prints waiting for sale...

When making the prints, neither of us had in mind any commonality or sense of bringing them together cohesively so our beginnings here are really quite a challenge.  I have decided to work in the sphere of dreams and so will cut and combine parts of our work, using some solid images and then having bits of images floating, dreamlike around the page.  The struggle will be to maker this all hold together with out looking too piecemeal.  Fun but imbued with a sense of difficulty.

We spent yesterday together in Fiona's studio (after having delicious coffee and chocolate cake to celebrate my birthday), and made some headway into our planning.  These few photographs show the way  my thoughts are heading.

Not quite sure how I will pull it all together but I think this is a good start.

maleny printmakers .....

I am back after a few weeks absence.  In the meantime many of you have commented on the wedding book I was making (and which was very well received) and the 'In Between Dreams' series I have been working on.  Thank you so much for watching this space even with me in hiding.

My mum died the night after the wedding, two weeks ago, and it left me bereft, exhausted, frantic etc - all those things we experience when we lose a beloved parent.  My father died last year, so with my mum's passing it means packing up and cleaning out of the home, preparation for sale and so forth.  A time consuming, and energy consuming task.

It is that stage of our lives ..... and life goes on apace. 

Like Fiona, I have been very busy trying to get all our small prints ready for the Maleny Printmaker's Exhibition.  Luckily I had done all the printing of these images (I think I printed about 150 in all) before my mum died and now I am busy with the signing, collating, cataloguing etc.  Artist's Statement and CV to come and then I am almost ready for Thursday when we set up the Exhibition.  Steve and I have all the friends we travelled though the desert with, here for the weekend as well so it will be a busy few days and quite a welcome change from all that has preoccupying me of late. 

The first three of these little pieces required quite a bit of work and are representative of my work of late.  They begin their lives as engravings and then I add black ink, watercolour and graphite layers.  I have worked some in warm, some in cool and some in black and white.

The next two prints follow in the same vein with engraving and ink, but the inspiration came directly from Ann Symes who gave me the idea of producing very small vessels.  I work often with vessel images in my etching, and also many of my larger drawings, and it had not really occurred to me that I could achieve a lovely result with these small images.  I think they actually work very well and will continue with them in a larger format as well.

You may remember these small etchings from the 'play day' a few of us had a Fiona and Barry's home - learning to print on aluminium with copper sulphate.  I added all the embossed marks later.

Friends cannot believe I have sold out my 'soul' with this little heart piece.  I have already given away a number of these and they seem incredibly popular!  Who would have thought. 

These little flower etchings also have a broader market appeal I imagine.  They are printed in many bright and varied colour ways, though for this blogging exercise, I did not want to shock you all with my use of colour .....

The few days we are open promise to be lots of fun .... we have prepared 'shopping lists' for those coming along in the hope that they realise what a wonderful chance this is to stock up their present drawers!