Here is a detail from the picture I posted yesterday. It is part of a facebook online competition run by the Cork St Open team – you can vote for the photos on it. If you’d care to, the link below should take you to the picture where you press ‘like’ to record a vote. (Since a recent WordPress update I’m unable to upload a live link so you will have to copy and paste, I’m afraid.)

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=560804003935632&set=pb.182097305139639.-2207520000.1353662852&type=3&theater

Just completed in time for the first snow. I planned this piece and prepared the support, i.e. made the paper, some time ago. This was an image that caught my eye in January, when the damp-enhanced colours of the paving-stones shone through a light dusting of snow which had fallen overnight and settled in places.

I really am not much the wiser, after fifteen years or so of seriously and serially making art pieces, about what ‘art’ is. Or what if anything I can contribute. It’s not just about beauty, or shock value, upsetting preconceptions, arousing recognition, making decor, providing metaphors, whatever the current fad or fashion is.

Lots of things will drive me to make or plan to make a piece. It can be a while before I get round to it – ideas ripen at a different rate and I do take photos to remind me later. There’s usually something extra-intense about the scene or moment or idea. Lots of elements come together to make (now this is really pretentious but I did study French literature!) what Sartre called ‘un moment parfait’. Something to do with a (fleeting) sense of enhanced perception.

Of course the end result is usually entirely different!

Hot off the press!

As it happens there is some printing on this little red dress made with hand-cast cotton paper: a sort of fantastical abstract bird shape and some small rings in orange, plus some tiny blue flower-like shapes. The red colour, however, is built up with numerous washes of different colours. The paper, having an irregular surface, takes up the colours in an interesting and slightly unpredictable way. It’s important to know when to stop – otherwise you get something like the traditional mud colour found in children’s paint pots at the end of a session.

Much of my time has been spent recently taking stock of things as a result of signing up for an online course with Kathryn Roberts. This dynamic and charming lady runs the Cork St Open Exhibition, among many other things. She brings an astute and educated (American) eye to the muddled professional life and practice of many an artist. A breath of fresh air, but SUCH HARD WORK!

The upside has been visits to the Affordable Art Fair in both Battersea and Hampstead last month. And lots of help and moral support.

This is the hardest bit of all. Not the thinking around the subject and how to carry it out. Not the making of the paper and gathering of materials, then setting it all up. Not even the making, painting, rethinking, revisiting, deciding, opting, trying, despairing, having a go – each piece is different. Nor the measuring, framing, stringing, labelling. Not even (horrors) the pricing.

It’s the PUBLICITY. No matter how good the piece, if no-one sees it, it won’t sell. And selling really isn’t just about the money. Of course that matters, we have to live, and feel justified in how we’ve chosen to live. It’s also about creating mental space for new work. If you’re surrounded by ‘old’ pieces – even quite new ones – your mind simply isn’t free to move on.

In the Midlands I was always busy with a fairly seamless succession of exhibitions – solo and group – plus workshops and other art-related activities. Moving South meant changing my habits and developing new patterns of work and contacts. I’ve been really busy with establishing our Artists’ Open House in not one but two locations over the last three years: do have a look at our Wolf Facebook page if you haven’t done so before:

www.facebook.com/MadameLupino

(I don’t seem able to post a live link at present.)

Now it’s time to look for new pastures….

Our household icon (as she would have it). I did this piece as a slightly ironic homage to the creature who sits on my drying paper, leaves paw imprints and grooms herself leaving piles of grit and fur all over the place. She seems to know when I have made somerhing new and exerts a fiendish ingenuity to make her mark on it. It can’t be much fun snoozing on damp cotton pulp.

The metal leaf here is not gold, it’s Dutch leaf (I imagine brass or some non-precious metal). I can’t have her getting uppity! And there’s quite a lot of it: I had to re-gild it after we moved house and the painting got slightly battered.

It has gone to a very superior household where they too have a superior cat. Also they picked up the literary reference, to a wonderful eighteenth-century poem about the habits of his cat (Jeoffry) by the poet Christopher Smart. He had a rather hard time of it and spent six years in Bedlam where he wrote this poem which, among other things, describes the habits of his cat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilate_Agno

Part of the text is to be found in the coloured borders which contain the saintly image.

This website is due for a massive overhaul, not before time. It’s done me well but things have moved on so there will be major changes before too long.

These two pieces, conversely, are backward-looking. In two ways. My botanical pieces are much influenced by the herbals and plant treatises of the medieval period and their later versions. A few people reading this may know that I designed a medieval curative garden last year for the wonderful Dilston Physic garden near Hexham, Northumberland.

One of my botanical pictures, a large quince piece, is now hanging in a garden room overlooking a newly-planted Quince Walk in a glorious Lincolnshire garden. Two more, an Aubergine and a Sage, are in a fabulous two-story conservatory. It’s nice, though unusual, to know where the work I produce eventually hangs, though when I remember I ask purchasers to send me a pic. It can be in a loo or a hall, it just gives it an afterlife in my mind to know it has a physical location.

I love the idea of mixing up text and picture, detail and overview, commentary and fact (or belief). This inevitably gives these pieces a retro feel and I enjoy doing them. But it’s important to avoid pastiche, so I’m not tempted to churn them out. That would be easy – they sell well and I have had some good commissions. I try to find an individal way to do each one – different techniques, mixing media.

So I hadn’t done many for some time – bar a couple last year which sold straight away – but my recent foray into art in the outdoors at the beautiful Sussex Prairies spurred me on to produce a few plant-based works. Here are a couple, made as a pair to the same dimensions.

Just back from a visit to family in Newcastle and York. Summer’s over, back to work. Luckily I made a batch of paper on one of the last warm sunny days before we left, so it’s now dry and waiting for the next steps.

Waiting for the train at York station I had another chance to enjoy the wonderful sweep and curve of the station, and took lots of photos. I want to have another go at this suject, larger and maybe more abstract. Here, Leaving York, is the first attempt I made earlier this year. It went on show at our Artists’s Open House at Wolf at the Door and was sold there and then.

When this happens I hardly have time to get used to a piece, especially when I start a new one straight afterwards. I have to go back and look at the photos!

https://www.facebook.com/MadameLupino
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jill-Tattersall/163132550413149

Unusual Plant and Art Fair. This wonderful event was held on Sunday at the fabulous Sussex Prairies, a garden started only five-ish years ago by Paul and Pauline McBride on inherited farmland.

It’s a mass of colour and shape and form: swirling drifts and blocks and mass plantings with little paths cutting through the concentric circles of the borders. At this time of year the paths are secret and semi-hidden which adds to the mystery and sense of discovery.

As to the plants and art, the plants were numerous and choice. A bit less art, and I don’t know how unusual it was (in my case) but it’s the first time I’ve showed art in a mini gazebo (as opposed to a large marquee). It didn’t rain heavily, just a mizzle in the morning, and there were thousands of punters. They weren’t in an art-buying mood, it has to be said, but it was a very enjoyable experience.

Other Wolf at the Door exhibitors were showing there, including Si Uwins and Alex Moore. And I have been invited to have work on display next season in the new garden room at Sussex Prairies – which leads to new thoughts of botanically-inspired work….

So far so good. Framed, sitting flat for safety.

Now all I’ve got to do is measure them, label them, D-ring and string them – and, hardest of all – price them. This I really hate. They are labour-intensive and time-consuming. But I want people to enjoy them and not see them as a commodity, to be able to afford to buy one even if they’re not wealthy. And even if I could and did give them away it would instantly reduce their ‘value’!

It’s lovely when someone comes back and asks for another piece – although I wish I knew where all my work was. Germany, Tasmania, France, US I know – but there must be hundreds of my pieces throughout the UK, in private and even a few public collections. It would be so interesting to have a map!

I’ve left my feet in the snapshot to give scale but it’s a bit misleading as the picture is foreshortened; the pieces are quite large.

The ‘tip’ is the pictures/pieces themselves. Apart from all the planning and thinking and experimenting and then ctually making the piece, there’s the question of how to present it.

I used to do quite a few pieces without frames, irregular shapes which I generally mounted on MDF to display them. I still do a few like that; I recently made (and sold) a piece called ‘My Kimono’ which was – no surprise – kimono-shaped. Tim very skilfully and obligingly cut the backing. (To my frustration, I have no picture of this in its final form. Fool! It came and went so quickly).

But mostly the great British Public like their work framed. I’ve experimented with all sorts: glazed and unglazed, ready-made, bespoke…. This can quickly get expensive – my work is in all shapes and sizes.

I’ve settled for our own style of white frame which can be used in two different ways, to create a deep but narrow frame, or a shallower but wider one. I get the wood specially cut and routed out, then the sainted and by now practised Tim turns it into simple but strong and (I hope) elegant frames.

Oddly, this works out more expensive than many ‘bought’ frames but it suits my pieces and allows the texture of the paper or cloth to show without distraction. Of course the frames need painting (and sanding and repainting) – that’s the bugbear. So it’s great when there’s a fine not-windy day at the right time.