Staithes Art Festival 2015

Well its back down to earth again after a really good weekend at the Staithes Art Festival. This is the second year I have exhibited with Hanover Studios and the lovely Joy Green, Trish Shaw and Caroline Thompson. A bit (!!) of rain on Saturday didnt put people off and the party atmosphere prevailed in spite of a little sogginess - at least there were lots of galleries to dive into when it started!

I took advantage of working as a collective and sneaked out for a few hours to join Ian Burke's Chiaroscuro printing course! As always it was excellent and I learnt how to carve a Japanese woodblock, print the image onto paper, transfer the same image onto lino then cut out the highlights to reprint onto the original image in a different colour. My design was rather intricate to finish in the time available so I shall be continuing with it in the studio this week.......more information and photos to follow!

Sunday was a glorious day with wall to wall sunshine. We all enjoyed talking about our work and I had some very interesting discussions about the concept of Wabi Sabi (more to follow on this too!) and current ideas on matter, reality and abstract painting. As well as printing and (hopefully) a bit of painting this week I shall be researching one or two ideas that came out of various discussions. For the moment though its back to preparing for teaching tomorrow and tidying up the studio! Here are some photos of the harbour from outside of the cottage we rented for the weekend. The first one was taken on Sunday morning and the second on Sunday evening: