Praeterita

The best open studio for artists is the one where they sell a lot of work. I mean, really, what else would qualify? Maybe having Person Famous in the 1970s come through the door and respond very positively to a series of etchings (actually happened). (Although he also left without buying anything, so...) But I would say that one of the best open studios (the second best one, perhaps) was the one where I premiered a six minute stop motion animation film. Here in fact is a clip from that film: I worked on it for six months in 2013. It was the first thing I completed in my new studio in the Cornelia Arts Building . I felt the need to explore subject matter and imagery related to my childhood in an English mining town, but in a medium other than painting or printmaking. A medium where you could tell more of a story, a continuous narrative as opposed to a static moment. I was pleased with the film, and invited people to come and see it for the first time in an open studio at the be...

Over on my studio blog, I've just posted a piece with lots of photos, detailing some of the intricate work involved in making a new 3-d piece of work for my next exhibition: link here .

So it's Memorial Day weekend in america, the traditional start to the summer season, and I am in my studio making buildings and machinery out of cardboard. I found some excellent boxes, which I covered in a thick layer of black paint to obscure their target/Amazon origins: I plan to overprint these in the lithographs, but using white ink only, to get a white on black background effect. Meanwhile, I'm coming to the end point for printing onto the boxes and stuff that were primed in white gesso. Here is a table laden with the haul from the last couple of studio visits: One of the fun things was printing onto the cardboard tubes (which will be chimneys in the finished pieces). My method was to ink up the paper-litho transfer, roll the tube up in it, wrap it in a few layers of tissue paper, and transfer the inked image using a bone folder: My current schedule is to finish all the props and sets by the third week of June, and then start the stop-motion a...

It's Father Day here in America. That is also the provisional title of my next exhibition in August, at which I will be showing, among other things, my short films and animations related to the theme. In honour of the day here in the USA, here is one of them:

After my last blog post, expressing resignation at a bad first day back in the studio after a long absence, an online friend, artist Lena Levin , reminded me that good days often follow bad days. During my last studio day, I set aside the rubbish I'd been hacking at and tried out my new animation set-up: The toy soldier is a figure I've used frequently before . I bought a high resolution webcam, which can take still shots, and is now plugged directly into my Netbook, so that I can do stop-motion animation more easily. (Previously, I took all the shots on a camera, transferred them to the laptop, processed the hundreds of stills so that they weren't all a billion megabytes, etc.) In that photo above, I was experimenting with a dolly/tracking shot by taping the webcam to the roof of a toy London bus. In all, a more promising creative day ...

What do these three people have in common, starting with stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen above? Then me: And finally Hugh Hefner, seen below posing with some attention-seeking blonde woman: Answer: our names are listed consecutively in the 'Acknowledgements' section of Sam Weller's Ray Bradbury biography . I happen to know Sam, and this in no way influences my opinion that he wrote an exceptionally good book about Bradbury's life, and his influence on American culture. I'm a bit mystified as to why I am in that list (for it is indeed I to whom he is referring to). But by coincidence, Sam linked together two very important people in my early teenage life. I was a huge fan of the stop-motion animations of Ray Harryhausen, particularly the Sinbad films . This might have been at the back of my mind when I made my own stop-motion animations as part of an installation a few years ago. And I, let us say, 'put to good use' my stolen copies of Playboy...