Farewell to 2017

2017 was jam-packed with work and events from start to finish. In the Spring the Música en Segura festival took me to Andalusia for Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time concert, for which I’d made images to be screened during the performance.

Back in the UK at the Lotte Inch Gallery in York, there was a two-person exhibition with my friend Sarah Raphael-Balme, and in Wales an exhibition at Oriel Tegfryn of all the drawings I’d made for the Random Spectacular Hansel & Gretel Picture Book published in 2016.

Below: specially-bound cover of Hansel & Gretel made for me by Christopher Shaw

The Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre I’d designed for Benjamin Pollock‘s Toyshop in Covent Garden was launched, alongside a beautiful pop-up card based on the theatre and a handsomely packaged game of Hansel & Gretel ‘Pelmanism’.

I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by Southampton Solent University. I lectured and/or taught at Southampton, Hereford and Cambridge, and these were wonderful interludes in an otherwise gruelling schedule of project deadlines. I guest curated an exhibition, Imagined Realms, at the Royal Cambrian in Conwy, and was able to invite a spectacular array of artists I both admire and love, to take part.

 

By far the lion’s share of effort went into completing the fourteen screenprint series in collaboration with Penfold Press, based on Simon Armitage’s 2007 translation of  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in time for the forthcoming exhibition opening on Jan 10th at the Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illuminating text from curator and art writer James Russell.

 

Below: separations on lithography film for The Exchange, and the completed print.

Below: Gouache, ink and pencil work on board  – The Stain of Sin.

More news about what’s planned for the Gawain series to be announced shortly. News too of Hansel & Gretel, who are about to embark on a thrilling journey in the company of a whole bunch of old and new friends with whom to enjoy the adventure!

I’ll be making a visual accompaniment for Daniel Broncano’s Música en Segura 2018, this time to the music of Stravinsky –

– and there’s to be a sweetly pretty new Pollock’s Toy Theatre project.

In the US Marly Youmans has produced a scintillating new collection of poems that I’ll be making a book cover and decorations for, and there’s to be an edition of Jeffery Beam’s Spectral Pegasus poems, illustrated with my series of paintings from the Dark Movements series.

2018 is set to be a year of seeing long term projects developing in ways unanticipated at the times of starting them. Plenty of challenges ahead, then. And deadlines, of course. Always there are the deadlines.

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Christopher Shaw’s Bookbinding for Hansel & Gretel

 

Hansel & Gretel was published last year by Random Spectacular in paper covers, which had always been the plan. I was enormously pleased with the edition as it was extremely thoughtfully produced.

Nevertheless, because the project had been a long one – it had taken me two years to produce all the illustrations as I was having to work on them between other projects – I was keen to celebrate the achievement with a ‘special’ binding of the book for my shelves.

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Bookbinder Christopher Shaw and I talked about the possibility of a special binding at the Hansel & Gretel book launch in London last September, and then over a period of weeks we discussed ideas in more detail. He sent me samples of cloth for the cover, and I began to make some paper oak leaves that he would apply to the cover after blind stamping shapes into the boards to receive them.

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Oak leaves had appeared in some of the images in the book, and so felt like an appropriate motif for the cover.

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We decided to have them looking as though they’d been blown across the covers.

Christopher’s beautiful binding for the book has far surpassed any hopes I’d had for it. When I opened the parcel from him today, I was overwhelmed by what he had made. The culmination of a long road of endeavour from the first tiny, dummy copy made for Random Spectacular, through the the many stages of creativity leading to this final, much appreciated keepsake, I find that I can’t stop looking at it and smiling.

Below: the dummy copy of Hansel & Gretel, made in 2014, helped establish the layout of the book.

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