Pictures at an Exhibition

The exhibition has come and gone. I had work in the room that used to house the fire engines (now a gallery) as well as work in the adjoining large studio, dotted with printing presses. Some 70 pieces in all. There was a combination of different versions of 8 printing plates, a series of drawings and several linked paintings.

I must say I always find it a satisfying experience, regardless of the volume of sales. Being able to stand, be surrounded by, and look at all of your work displayed together, whenever you want to, for two and a half weeks is really special and the comments of all of the viewers a welcome boost to morale.

However, the time flies by and before you know it you are packing up and removing all trace of your existence from the space. From being “special” life returns to normal and everything seems a little flat and bland for a while.

The next theme and body of work however beckons and slowly interest, and then the familiar absorption, begins to build and the exploration of a new facet of “detail in nature” gathers momentum.

It's exhibition time

It is time to put all of the work on my current theme “Sea +Land =” together for my biennial solo exhibition which will be on at the Firestation from October 21 to November 7 (see invitation below).

It is strange, but I find exhibiting less daunting than mounting the work. Being congenitally organised I always work out exactly where everything will hang and even have the price list ready before the work is on the wall. Hanging the work is then just a technical exercise; making sure things are regularly spaced, in line, level etc etc. Hanging is time consuming, especially as I like to work in small modules which I then display in groups, much like a patchwork, but it is fairly predictable so I can work at it calmly (unlike the mounting process).

The pieces always looks different when up on the walls. There can be some surprises, usually good and I find it satisfying to see all of my explorations on a particular facet of the details in nature combined together in one place.

Last night by chance I went to a recital of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Today, while swimming, I was pondering what type of music could be composed about my work. Hopefully it would be about harmony and tranquillity – definitely no witches for me.

The scary part, mounting the work

As I find frames a distraction I have developed a system for exhibiting which involves gluing work onto a painted board, leaving it weighted down with large, heavy, encyclopaedias until “set” and then cutting around the work so that it is flush with the edge of the board. After that I spray the work many times with a matt spray, to protect it from the elements, and attach a hanging wire. I am sure that the work would not suffer if there were fewer applications of the matt spray but, as ever, I err on the side of caution. It would be terrible, after all, to sell work and find that it had been attacked some sort of paper chewing bug in its new home. 

While I have mounted many pieces of work in this way I still find the process rather nerve wracking. After all I don’t want to ruin something that I have slaved over for many hours by finding that there are bubbles in the glue or that the edges of the paper are burred because the cutting knife was not sharp enough. Consequently every new body of work is viewed with trepidation when it comes to the time to put it all together for an exhibition.

Since I have an exhibition coming up in October I am currently in the “mounting” phase. I have mounted about 18, 30 x 30 cm collagraph and lino prints without incident and need to start on the series of smaller monotypes I have done. I meant to do them this week but have been procrastinating, working instead on entries for a group exhibition involving the design of wine labels. 

Finishing the collagraphs

In the past month I have been finishing off collagraph prints ready for my solo exhibition in October.

I started by printing a lot of sheets of paper in 2 colours, using a “generic” plate with an overall, impasto gel, stipple pattern on it. Over this background I printed each one of 5 plates, with images of “details in nature” that I have seen while walking beside the ocean, in 2 more colours.

The image plates were made by gluing cut out paper onto a square of cardboard and then adding texture that would trap printing ink with a medium called impasto gel. The impasto gel sets hard and once protected with a couple of coats of shellac, can be printed many times.

As I was still not entirely happy with the level of definition in the prints I had produced I then worked on them further using aquarel pencils. Rather than produce an edition of say 10 identical prints, which I find really tedious, I have treated each print as a “one off,” using different colours for both the background and image for all of them.

Building depth

Over the past month or so I have been experimenting yet again. It is a never ending quest.

This time the experiments were with a collage technique to create more “relief” works based on the patterns on shore platforms that I have observed while walking.

Cutting the patterns out was something to relax with while listening to an audio book in the evenings.

Gluing the layers together was however a bit more tricky. I tried to paint glue onto the backs of the cut outs with a fine paint brush but apart from getting sticky fingers I found that the glue dried long before I was finished so that adhesion was not ideal. After that I used a model makers technique which one of my sons passed on to me some time ago. It involved mixing equal quantities of PVA glue and water and then quickly applying the mix as a wash to the surface of the backing sheet, sticking on the cut out and applying more wash then cleaning everything off before putting the piece face down on a glass bench with hefty books on top to weigh it down until dry. The PVA dries transparent and invisible – amazing.