I’m amazed to say that I got the People’s Choice prize at the Bath Open Art show which finished on Saturday 26th October (2024).
Categories
Requiem for Oil update
Month: October 2024
Visiting Bath today and the lovely Topping & Company bookshop -near the Abbey and the Roman Baths – I came across two fairly recently published volumes concerning hares, The Way of the Hare, Marianne Taylor (2017 Bloomsbury) and Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton (2024 Canongate). The first has a linocut print cover by Ian MacCulloch
a terrific printmaker who specialises in wildlife and seems to have a love for the hare. I feel I need to put far more effort into my series of hare masks! Not to mention my printmaking which is sadly neglected since the demise of Cato Press in 2020.
Categories
Afghan Wedding
In the distant days of 2011 when President Obama was ‘surging’ on Afghanistan, continuing the US invasion and occupation, there was yet another drone strike on a celebration gathering and the usual denial/excuses were dribbled into those few sections of the corporate media who were slightly interested in the fate of ‘natives’. The US military refers to those places it invades as ‘Indian Territory’ and any opposition – real or imagined – as ‘hostiles’, the same terms in use when the native peoples in the Americas were being destroyed by Europeans mainly originating from Britain. It frequently names its weapons and procedures using First Nation names, e.g. Apache ground attack helicopters. I’m reminded that the current mass slaughter of Arabs by the western proxy state apartheid israel is just the latest round killing, destruction and impoverishment of much of West Asia by the USA and it’s allies such as the UK.
Anyway I was prompted to draw and then later work on those drawings, in textiles and other media such as the enamel piece on this blog.
I have a few textile versions in various stages of completion but never quite finished, the one I’m posting here had a wide border I didn’t like which I removed last year, now I am adding a blue border which will be embroidered.
There is a guide to Istalif pottery on the Jindhag Foundation site. I especially like the motifs used to decorate this fine handmade pottery so something loosely similar will be added to the blue border using black thread and free motion machine stitch
I feel I’m finally completing this textile piece and can also now hopefully finish the other versions.
I’m waiting to find out if Requiem for Oil has won a prize in the Bath Open Art Prize Exhibition 2024 – the show is free entry – as the judging was yesterday. The standards of exhibitors are very high so I’m not optimistic. But in the meantime I came across the truly wonderful Sue Coe, an artist and activist working in the USA, born in the UK just a few months later than me. Although I often search for artists who are activists and produce political art I can’t recall seeing her work but she is an illustrator as well as a painter and printmaker and he work has often appeared on the (essential) Counterpunch website, a place I look at almost every day.
NB. The winners of the Bath Open Arts Prize were: 1st Aran Illingworth (Bag Lady, a textile piece); 2nd Oliver Hurst, (Moth on a Building, oil painting). Many congratulations to both.
Categories
Linocut exercise
I have been reluctant to post this print as it seems er, gloomy but it was really an exercise in cutting away to get the thinest linocut lines and a lot of blank space and still get a print.
I’ve put other links about CoBrA but this is an excellent introduction to the movement written on the 75th anniversary of it’s founding, last year.
As the seeming stampede to world war by the western states and their proxies continues the political stance of the CoBrA artists is more important than ever.
A visit to the CoBrA Museum in Amsterdam is not to be missed if you find yourself in that fair city.
Dimensions : 87,5 x 160
The spirit of the movement is anti-formalist.
Categories
The Serious Art of Quilting
I stumbled across this article from 2021 while I was preparing a leaflet to accompany my Requiem for Oil quilt which will be on display in Bath next week at the 44AD Gallery.
“The serious art of quilting: the history of patchwork and political activism. The craft of quilting has been around for centuries, and has more recently emerged as a serious art form in its own right. Fiona McKenzie Johnston explores its history and contemporary relevance.”
Another article looking at the same theme, from 2020 by Isis Davis-Marks https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-quiltmakings-deep-traditions-influencing-contemporary-art
The ‘art world’ gets a mention in these articles (and many others) but isn’t clearly defined, although it seems to mean the dealers and galleries rather than craft/gift shops and local shows. Quilts, “warm, comfy, fluffy” do get discussed and some contemporary makers get a mention. There is a wealth of craft work which is often undervalued – especially if created by women – and the originality of much of this work as well as it’s innate quality is testimony to it’s real artistic (and monetary) value, in short collectors want it in the same way they wanted ‘native’ and later ‘ethnic’ art.
Most of my textile work isn’t political in any obvious sense and only a little of that which is has been on public show so far.
The textile prints below were all based on Afghan poppies, quilted into 15cm squares and intended as a border to a larger quilt called Afghan Wedding, similar in image to the enamel work which is on this blog. But I didn’t much care for the border and so the piece is still waiting to be completed years later.
Other squares were based on tile images from Afghan ceramics.
These are all stencil mono-prints, the stencils were cut from thin film and the prints made with soft rollers or sponge, acrylic paint mixed with fabric print medium, quilted after that.
Afghan Wedding quilt, for in progress in 2019.
FlagFly 