Miniatures in Bloom

A final selection here, this time of small works by Carolyn Sibbald (the first two) and Carla Mines (the third), before Brunel Broderers' exhibition at The Arts Centre at The Meeting House in Ilminster, Somerset, closes on Saturday.

The Arts Centre offers a very pleasant small gallery, well-lit and with plenty of display space for small installation work as well as good wall space. 

Footfall has been good and comments encouraging! The very good coffee shop makes it a really pleasant day out. We will be sorry to leave on Saturday. 

If you live locally and have not yet been, general opening times for the gallery are given on the Art Centre website via link above or by clicking on the poster in the side bar of this blog. 

Please note: Closing time for the Gallery this coming Saturday (31 October) will be at 12 noon because our exhibition is ending and our work has to be taken down ready for the next exhibition. 

The Brunel Broderers' exhibition in The Arts Centre at the Meeting House in Ilminster in Somerset, is now open to view.

As keen-eyed observers will notice, much of the work I am showing with the group this time has again been developed following a visit to the Chateau at Chenonceau in the Loire region of France in July 2019. 

There are several new pieces. I have developed further the layering and the opacity of the images to give depth. I have layered several repeating images each with different levels of opacity and have explored the shapes (both positive and negative) generated by the overlapping of these images. 

I have also extended my thoughts to give a fresh look at the use of colour to suggest further the complex history of Catherine de Medici's life - of political machinations and dark deeds and perhaps blood spilt. 

In all this work, it is a strange fact that this historic theme of evil deeds contrasts strongly in my memory with the formal beauty and apparent peace of the gardens when I saw them. I have hoped to suggest this conflict in my work. 

Throughout, I have developed my response through Adobe Photoshop Elements from the photographs I took during my visit. The imagery which resulted was discussed at length (here and here). 

A snapshot of each of the members of the group is to be found on the Brunel Broderers' blog. Each artist is featured in a separate post with brief details of their work. 

Covid restrictions notwithstanding, the exhibition runs in the gallery until Saturday 31 October. If you are able to come, you will find a warm welcome in the gallery and in the café which is open during the centre's opening hours. 

In view of current restrictions, it would be wise to consult the Art Centre's website before visiting to check the opening times of the gallery.

Exhibition in Ilminster

Covid restrictions notwithstanding, I will be exhiting work in October with the Brunel Broderers in Bloom, at the Arts Centre at the Meeting House in Ilminster, Somerset. This is a new venue for the group and we are very much looking forward to seeing our work in a different setting. 

The exhibition runs from Tuesday 13th to Saturday 31st October and will show a mixture of new work and pieces from the exhbition of the same name held in Cheltenham last September. As well, we hope, as attracting new visitors, this will provide another opportunity to see pieces we showed last year together with further work developed on the same theme. 

The work explores growth and flowering and gardens and each member has approached the subject from their own perspective. The exhibition will show the wide variety of approaches and outcomes developed by the members of the group.

                                         Carla Mines                                                               Liz Harding                                                                      Carolyn Sibbald

Carla Mines has considered further issues of polution and the environment using machine embroidery on disolvable fabric. She has focused particularly on the effects of our casual use of plastic and on the problem of the dense masses of algae or algal blooms which can occur in both marine and fresh water. Liz Harding's work explores colour and growth through machine embroidery enhanced with hand stitched marks on painted organdie. Carolyn Sibbald's folded and cut books and structures, often incorporating delicate stitch, provide a fascinating miniaturised perspective.     

                      Corinne Renow-Clarke                                            Margaret Robbie                                                             Linda Babb

Corinne Renow-Clarke will be showing a series of richly coloured turned-edge appliqués in work that looks afresh at plants we bring close to home. I have continued to explore shape and pattern in landscape, this time through more representational work particularly exploring imagery in the gardens at Chenonceau in France. Linda Babb has based her work on the traditional flower motifs found in the buildings of Marrekesh, seen there on frequent visits.

**A word of warning: because of the inevitable impact of Covid 19, this gallery is operating curtailed opening hours - 10 am till 2 pm and will only be open from Tuesday to Saturday. The café will be serving teas / coffees and a limited selection of sandwiches and cakes during Gallery opening hours. 

Printing and painting

As I said in my previous post, I've been painting and roller printing white fabric with acrylic paint and Liquitex permanent inks, often in combination. This time, I've used a range of cotton and linen fabrics to see how they react to the addition of colour. 

Above and below, various accidental motifs seem to be appearing. Irregular vertical and horizontal lines of ink develop from the roller and circles or near-circles from a brush with both the ink or the acrylic paint.

The accidental nature of this sort of work is what particularly appeals to me. Although it's difficult to see in these photos, the light linen produced especially delicate results. 

In each case, the rollering of paint was chosen particularly to suggest reflections in high rise buildings. I plan to select and cut out sections from these fabrics for small appliqué pieces. 

Left Overs

Playing as I do, I took small left over cropped pieces from larger abstracted photgraphic images and rolled acrylic paint over them selectively with a narrow paint roller (brayer). As I was finishing, I rolled the remains of the colour onto strips of an old white cotton bedsheet from my mother's house - this was all about using up left overs, after all! I then experimented.

I stitched a small square from the pile of painted croppings onto the cotton sheeting and added some other rows of stitching to add extra texture. It was interesting how much the parallel stripes of rolled ink suggested the high rise buildings from which the small photographic image had come. They seemed to have come full-circle.

Then, I assembled small croppings from the abstracted photographs. 

In this, it was interesting how strongly the black elements in the photos came through the ink creating depth and a quite different and less static effect which I may explore further.

It's always encouraging when idle experiments and 'what ifs' generate thoughts for what may come next.

Making marks

I found this card in my stash of images yesterday afternoon when I was searching for intriguing images by other artists to include in my current sketchbook.

It is called The Quilt, which seemed appropriate, and is an original wood engraving by Fiona Hope. Further examples of her work and that by other members of the Society of Wood Engravers are to be found here. I think I bought the card when I was in Scotland and paid several visits to the studios of artists in Aberdeenshire who were exhibiting in North East Open Studios a few years ago - but that may not be the case as I'm not organised enough to annotate my cards when I buy them!

The card has a decidedly textile feel to it and I was fascinated by the range of marks so I set about recreating them with a black Uniball Signo roller ballpen on white paper (thereby inverting the images). I dotted, cross hatched and created thick and thin vertical and diagonal lines and arcs within a hand-drawn grid.

An excellent, idle occupation for a rather chilly afternoon in Coronavirus lockdown.