Just a second...and other print exchanges

It has been a busy year!  Buying and selling and moving house - from the Melbourne to central Victoria, and a trip to Japan, has meant that I haven't had much time for making art.  I did, however sign up to three or four mini-print exchanges, which was a great thing to do, as at least I did get a few small things made.  I moved here almost three months ago, but with the trip to Japan just 2 1/2 weeks later (which was a pretty crazy thing to have organised...but the flights were so cheap!), and then a short trip to Perth to visit my son who moved there earlier this year, I haven't even managed to set up my studio properly yet. It's all been very positive, of course, so I'm not complaining...  Hopefully by the New Year, I'll be all set up and ready to go.
But to finish the year, I thought I'd post images of the prints I made for the various exchanges.
They are all linocut prints and I had to keep them fairly straightforward, in terms of process.
Firstly there was the Magpie postcard exchange, organised by the Printmaking Sisters (Annie Day and Robin Ezra) from NSW.

 

More information and images of all the postcards can be seen here.

 

Next was the International Print Exchange, a long-running, unthemed exchanged organised by greendoorprintmaking.org. See more here.

My print a simple image of an armchair - 'Waiting'.

Next was another themed postcard exchange- Bears and Blooms: Postcards from the Edge of Extinction, organised by Bittondi Printmakers Association in Adelaide.  My postcard is of a small orchid, the Robust Greenhood Orchid, previously believed to be extinct, which was recently discovered to be growing near Bendigo, not too far from where I'm now living.

Most recently I posted off my twelve prints to the US for the huge exchange organised by The Sketchbook Project. The theme 'Just a second' seemed to offer so many possibilities. I considered my second-place medals from my teenage calisthenics years, some sort of stop sign (just a minute, hang on, wait up...), but was attracted to the idea of second-best. Perhaps - just a second-best friend...but I went with 'Just a second-best dress', partly because I have a bit of a collection of images of beautiful vintage dresses.

Because I was so pushed for time, (aren't I always!) I forgot to take photos before I posted them off, so this is a proof.
I'm quite in awe of the organisers of all these exchanges, who dedicate so much time, energy and organisational skill to each project. In most cases there is an exhibition of the prints and usually one print from each participant is used for fundraising.  It's a wonderful thing to do! Yay for the www!

Well, I really have been distracted!!

In spite of starting the year with very good intentions, it just doesn't seem to be happening here! I have made some work, but life has largely been absorbed by a long-planned move to the country. I've had to resolve to get this done and not worry too much about what else doesn't get done...because one of my primary aims is to change my life so that I have more time for art making and writing. I sold my house in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne about six weeks ago, and am now in the very exciting process of looking for something to buy in central Victoria.

I have been slowly working on another linocut  in the series 'A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats'. This one is 'Two cats', and is a little different in format.
Here is a peek at a section of it. I'll show some more later...

 

 

 

The other thing that I finally managed to do is to open an Etsy shop.

I launched it about a month ago with six prints, and now have to get more active.

Planning on putting something else up very soon.

Here's a link to it, if you care to take a look.

 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PennyPeckham

 

 

February already!

Oh dear! It's terrible to realise that it's February already and I've only managed one post this year...in spite of very good intentions. My attempt to establish a daily practice - to produce something, a collage, a drawing, each day has faltered, staggered, restarted.  I have to blame the lethargy-inducing extreme heat. We've had strings of days around and above the 40 degree Celcius mark. Very draining! I have been working on a print for ‘Bimblebox 153 Birds’, a multi-arts project responding to the 151+ bird species recorded on the Bimblebox Nature Refuge, Queensland, which is threatened by the proposed China First mine. I'm working on a couple of versions of a linocut print of the bird I was allocated - the Varied Sitella. More information and further links can be found on the project's facebook page here.
Here are working proofs of both. I was surprised that I prefer version 1, when I thought that version 2 was looking much stronger. They both need more work however.

version 1

version 2

I treated myself to a short trip to Sydney this week, mainly to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is a very participatory exhibition - lots of works that visitors add to, or may take away from. It's quite beautiful and meditative, which sounds somewhat contradictory in light the participatory elements, but true nevertheless.  There are a couple of videos of Yoko performing her work 'Cut Piece', one from 1964 and one from 2003. It's quite difficult to watch the early one.  She looks like a young, very vulnerable, but courageous woman - very moving. In the latter she's much more in control and respected by the audience/participants. There was an early Fluxus film of anonymous bottoms that I found funny and intriguing.

Wish Tree for Sydney

 

Morning Beams / Cleaning Piece - Riverbed both 1996

 

We're all water 2006 / 2013

If you happen to be in Sydney over the next 6 weeks or so, I would highly recommend making the trip to Carriageworks, not far from Redfern Station, to see Chance, the wonderful installation by French artist Christian Boltanski. Carriageworks is a multi-arts venue in a huge old industrial building, presumably where train carriages were built. It's the perfect space for Boltanski's tall, narrow scaffolding structure through which a ribbon - of grainy images of faces of newborn infants sourced from Polish press announcements - runs.

The building is pretty impressive  - the corridor to the toilets!

    
I also went to the Art Gallery of NSW to see America, Painting a Nation, which was quite interesting. Much more impressive, for me, is the exhibition Yirrkala-drawings. There are 81 coloured crayon drawings on butchers paper from 1947, by senior ceremonial leaders at Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, who produced hundreds of the vibrant drawings for the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

I was also delighted to see Imants Tillers' Conversations with the Bride on show in the 20th Century Australian galleries. It was quite a wonderful experience to wander through and have an up-close viewing of this installation that I had studied as a student of Australian Art History at Latrobe University in the mid 1990s.  You can probably work out from these details the identity of 'the bride' referred to in the title!

Imants Tillers Conversations with the Bride (details)

Though pushed for time (had to catch the train to the airport), I always love to pay a visit to some of my favourite works - Grace Cossington Smith's The Curve of the Bridge (1928-29), The Lacquer Room (1936) and The Sock Knitter (1915) and the Margaret Prestons. There was also a small group of Martin Sharp's brilliant posters on the wall, including Mr Tambourine Man, from about 1967.

I had a fabulous time - Sydney is a great place for a flying visit!

New Year (almost!) daily practice

I'm beginning the new year with a commitment to try to maintain an (almost) daily practice. I was motivate by reading back over the last year or so of the Missouri Bend Studio blog, particularly her discussion of daily rituals and practice, which I found extremely admirable - something to work toward. As well as talking to a friend who resolved to take one photo a day.  I wonder how she's going.  Less that two weeks in and I've already decided that attempting a very quick (bad) drawing late at night in order to fulfil a daily drawing commitment was really a bit pointless. So, I've decided that I will continue to attempt a daily practice, while allowing myself days off if that's how it works out. Inspired by some of Missouri Bend's work, I started with small collages, as I had also been messing about with one or two during the quiet days between Christmas and the New Year. This one if from then.

 

And the first of this year's are

which started off with the little drawing...

Then last Sunday I went to Drop By Drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria, where two or three hundred people sat in the 18th Century European galleries and drew, under the guidance of artist Minna Gilligan.  It was good fun and I particularly enjoyed the 'blind contour drawing with development' exercise and produced this

which I quite liked.

So then I pulled out my long-neglected copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and thought that it might be a good basis for my daily drawings...blind contours really take the pressure off.  I have become very tight and in fact somewhat terrified of drawing. Too tense to put pencil to paper. So,

      and an Agapanthus flower in bud, both ways - blind

 and with looking

 

Feeling much happier!