Working with what I have

I know I'm not the only one who has days sometimes when nothing works, I have no ideas and I feel like I should just give up trying to be an artist.  Last Friday was one of those - just terrible! (It didn't help that I was trying to print in greens. That, I think I should give up on!)
At least I have other creative interests and after giving up for the day I could do some knitting!

I have had a couple of much more positive days in the studio in the last week and also have to remind myself that part of the issue at the moment is that I'm working under the self-imposed restriction of working with what I have. As a printmaker who doesn't often work on a large scale I have lots of small pieces of 'leftover' paper and this year (being somewhat financially challenged!) I am attempting to use up what I have.

Also, I suppose part of the problem at the moment is that I have been working on a body of work that will hopefully have several  groups of outcomes - a series of square format prints in different (smallish) sizes, some larger works that will be pieced from yet smaller squares and a series of small artist books. So currently I have a lot of work in progress, but at times have difficulty in seeing how I will get to a finished state with much of it.
So these are some of the pieces that hopefully will eventually be part of something!

And trying out some possibilities for a pieced work in blues...

or this

(Most days) I have enjoyed experimenting with colour and layering forms both natural and manmade, using stencils on a gelatin plate, working with cardboard collagraph plates, and finally overprinting some with linocut text - fragments of Leonard Cohen lyrics/poetry.
Still a way to go!

Work in Progress - and some finished!

I have been working!
I've been enjoying experimenting with collagraphs and gelatin printing, layering and experimenting with colour.

The main collagraph plate I've been using recently - a bit steam-punk!

Building up layers - gelatin prints and collagraph.

Recently got to the point of finishing some small  (18 x 18 cm) works off - with some linocut text for an exhibition with a 30 x 30 cm size limit.  The size they will be when framed.
Still a bit Leonard Cohen obsessed!

For Leonard 1

For Leonard 2

For Leonard 3

For Leonard 4

Too late for a quick look back !!

Oh my goodness, I started writing this post as a quick look at the last few months of 2015 as the year was finishing!
But now it's long gone!
I was just going to touch upon some of the highlights of the last two or three months of the year.
I'm going to have to give up on that and just mention a couple of things here now, then start off 2016 with a new post about current things.
Forgive me.

During 2015, my first full year of living in central Victoria I was very happy to become part of the Goldfields Printmakers group. More information about the group can be found here.
James Pasakos, from Federation University, Ballarat, attended  IMPACT9 - the international biennial printmaking, held in 2015 in Hangzhou, China, from 18 to 21 September. There he presented a folio of prints by members of the group referencing the history of the Chinese prospectors in the region during the gold rush of the later 19th century.
For my research I visited Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum and Chinese Garden. I was very impressed by the huge collection of artefacts, objects and installations.  I could have stayed much longer than the time I'd allowed! I'll have to get back there.

I've always been attracted to ginger jars, so used one on each print, combined with
calligraphy on the first taken from the inner wall of the garden.
Well-known Beijing poet and calligrapher Ke Wen Hui arrived in Australia for a family visit in 1998. Upon viewing the Golden Dragon Museum he was impressed by the Chinese heritage in Bendigo, and composed several poems, painting them on the walls.
The given translation of the poem I used is:
'In deep thinking, visitors will go home with cranes nestled in their sleeves. Behold the beauty and prosperity of the Garden. Surrounded by the tranquility of this environment, you will only think reflective thoughts.'
The other image on the second print is a detail from an embroidered garment.
(Somewhat dodgy images, sorry.)

My last post was just before a small solo exhibition I had in October/November at 69 Smith Street gallery, a small artist-run gallery in Collingwood (an inner suburb of Melbourne). The gallery is a double-storey shopfront with multiple spaces. It's nice to exhibit there because there are always several other solo or group shows there at the same time and so you get quite a good audience.  I had a small space upstairs and showed prints from four different bodies of work.  The last year or so has been a time of trying to work out where I'm going.

At the opening, with a couple of works from the series With these hands - self portrait.

I have made quite a lot of work relating to knitting and other needlecrafts over the years.
The works in the image above continue that theme.

There were a couple of recent works from the ongoing series, A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats and new works messing about with still life elements and layering.
This one is more recent; getting a bit braver with colour!

I'm really enjoying working on this series, being very playful and experimental with colour.
I'll post some more images quite soon.

 

Simple Things

I've been very busy making work for various exhibitions and frequently forget to take photos of works in progress. But i have a small solo exhibition opening next week and so post this quickly here and hopefully may get back at more length very soon.

With these hands - Self-portrait 2 2015

PENNY PECKHAM

Simple things - Linocuts

69 Smith Street Gallery

69 Smith Street, FITZROY 3065

Opening - Friday 23 October, 6 - 8 pm

21 October - 8 November 2015

Wed – Sat 11am – 5pm, Sun 12pm – 5pm

Penny Peckham works primarily as a printmaker, and with a background in Art History, much of the work she produces relates to her areas of research, particularly art by or relating to women. This exhibition includes linocut prints from several series.  The newest, which gives its title to the exhibition, is an exploration of simple still life elements. There are two works from the series  A Taxonomy of (Art)Cats,  prints of cats taken from various of Art Historical sources, and organized into playful scientific classifications, and the With these hands (self portrait) works are part of an ongoing series of long standing. 

Printing knitting!

Planning on combining these two plates as a single image. Have printed the knitting hands (mine) several times in order to play around. Perhaps I should remove all of the dark knitted fabric...or lighten it  up very much, leaving just just a suggestion?

Simple things

As well as doing a bit of gelatin plate printing lately, I have also been doing some planning and cutting of lino plates. I've decided to revisit a favourite theme from a few years ago for a postcard exchange with the theme 'first'.

'The first thing she ever knitted'

I also proofed this plate, which I'm planning to print over a second plate of large circles, very pale possibly translucent grey. Yes, keeping with the circles...and other simple objects.

Simple objects can be carriers of multiple meanings. Thinking of the work of Australian artist Katherine Hattam and of course, Van Gogh.

I originally had all the writing in the lower-case script, but thought it might work better in capitals. 

Both are on the plate at this stage. I need to get rid of one, also clean it up a bit and fix the nick in the arm of the chair! Planning to fill the gap on the second plate.

  

I suppose it is too late to wish you all a Happy New Year!

I am beginning to settle into my new life - and am loving it! I've never lived in the country before, but have for many years had a desire to do so eventually, and have been talking about making this move - to Castlemaine - for about ten years. So, it has taken me a while....
I'm currently driving to Melbourne once a week for a couple of days work, and am really enjoying it; getting to see the countryside in the best light, particularly the early morning, but early summer evenings are lovely too.  I've begun to realise why so many artists are drawn to the landscape as subject. I'm beginning to feel quite emotional when I reach the hills as I near home - after only a few months!
And although I've still two or three fairly major things to organise - particularly getting a shed lined and insulated and transformed into a decent studio - I do have a small studio space in the house and have started playing around pretty regularly with ideas and media.  I visited the studio of a new friend, a local artist, and we had a lovely couple of hours of show and tell, which inspired me to get back to making books.
So I made a gelatine/glycerine plate, pulled out some book works-in-progress and have had a few sessions playing.
I'm quite pleased with these experiments and beginnings.

 

I am also currently working something to have a small presence in the Castlemaine State Festival in March - having a lot of fun cutting circles from prints.

 

I've got a month or so to fill that white shoe-box with circles.  It's a looking back at my printmaking up to this point.  Seems a reasonable thing to do, with everything changing...and moving made me realize what a lot of work I have sitting around in boxes and folders. 
I'm very much steeped in Leonard Cohen lyrics/poetry at the moment, as I'm reading another biography - I'm Your Man, by Sylvie Simmons - given to me by one of my lovely sons for Christmas (although he didn't actually choose it. You get the best presents when you buy them yourself!)  The biography is the best I've read...and it makes me go back to the songs, listening closely.
So the shoe-box of circles of prints will be titled after a Cohen song - That Don't Make It Junk. The lyric goes, 'took my diamond to the pawnshop, but that don't make it junk'. These are all quite flawed diamonds - mostly student works, proofs and unsuccessful prints.
I also had one more miniprint edition to send off in January - for the Winged Messengers Exchange, which will be exhibited at Hahndorf Academy in the Adelaide Hills during Adelaide Fringe Festival. Proceeds from sales will go to the Bird SA conservation fund. Some more information and images can be found here.

 

There are birds there! See, four of them, on the wire, (another ongoing Cohen-esque theme in my work), and it's not the first time, either, that I've used the 'Counting Crows' rhyme!

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!

Cats and Cohen - done and dusted!

Well, my exhibition, The Obsessions of a Woman of a Certain Age - Cohen & Cats, is finished. I'm very happy...lots of people came to see it, had lots of positive feedback and even sales!! Thank you to everyone who came to the opening and throughout the exhibition. Here are some images, for anyone who would have liked to see it... These are from A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats

Small prints

installation

Sleeping / sitting down cats

And From the Book of LC.  The space was tiny, so it was impossible (without a wide angle lens) to get the  whole wall of the installation in one image.  

 

 

The Obsessions of a Woman of a Certain Age - Cohen & cats

It's been very quiet here lately because I've been frantically preparing for a solo exhibition at 69 Smith Street Gallery, Fitzroy. You might call it a self-indulgent celebration of things I love!

It's installed now, in a small gallery upstairs.  There are two bodies of work - A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats, linocut prints of cats from Art History, organised into pseudo-scientific classifications; and From the Book of L.C., a cluster of small paintings of fragments of Leonard Cohen poetry/lyrics in colourful abstract fields. The opening is on Saturday afternoon - do drop in if you are able!

Here is a peek at the paintings. It's not actually that blue. I was SURE I had the camera on the right setting!

Another print exchange print

 

Earlier this year I decided to participate in three or four print exchanges.  This is for the second one - a  Print People exchange. Relating to the series A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats (read more here.), for these small-print exchanges I've decided upon hybrids - cats that combine elements from two or three sources.  The form of this one is based upon a work by an anonymous 19th century American printmaker working in a naïve style, with markings from a 17th century woodcut from an English publication, The Historie of Four-footed Beastes, compiled by Edward Topsall; and Barbara Hanrahan (Australian printmaker and writer.) I bought myself Annette Stewart's biography of Hanrahan for Mother's Day and it arrived in time for me to incorporate the dotted chest/underbody markings she often used. I hadn't realised that there were cats in a lot of her prints. If you don't know her work here is a link to some of her prints, held in the Art Gallery of NSW. (oh, now that I look, there are lots of cats!)  I read most of her books, both novels and short stories, years ago...think I'll have to dip in again after the biography.