I have a confession

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Hello

I am Jane and I’m a happy urbanite. There, I said it. I realise this is unfashionable, possibly even shocking, and flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that says everyone wants to escape to the country. If a TV series with that very title is currently in its 25th season then all those viewers can’t be wrong, nor can the followers of many Instagram accounts celebrating the rural idyll.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not averse to the countryside, far from it. I do like a bit of peace and quiet in the Yorkshire Dales, being able to pause, breathe deeply and hear nothing but skylarks, distant sheep and maybe some running water, but that’s for the occasional day out. I think I would quickly get bored and, importantly, lonely if that greeted me every morning. As I get older I realise I like having restaurants, galleries and museums on my doorstep. I like being able to walk to the Post Office and the library. Most of all, I like people. For me one of the hardest things about lockdown was the loss of the small daily interactions with strangers which remind us we are part of a community. I don’t think I was alone in this.

An unusually quiet morning outside York Minster

Nor does this mean I dislike nature, as I think a cursory glance at my work would show. I would hate never to see greenery and wildlife and my perfect urban living includes gardens, parks and wild areas, with people of course. I am very lucky then to live where I do. While a walk around a green space can be calming, the city centre gives me energy. The sound of the stonemasons working on the Minster (and knowing those sounds have been the same for the last 600 years), the music of buskers, the babel of languages among visitors, the cooking smells from restaurants, the laughs of a crowd watching a street magician; all this feeds my soul as much as a view of a mountain or the sound of waves on the shore.

I’ve been pondering this recently because I made an idle post on social media about a TV drama in which someone lived on Royal Crescent in Bath, and said wouldn’t that be lovely. I think every single reply I got was about tourists and people and how it wouldn’t be lovely at all, with one person even kindly explaining to me, because I clearly didn’t know, that Bath has a Lot of Visitors. (As it happens, Bath has around 6 million annual visitors, while my home city of York, has around 8.9 million. Yes I did look it up). That the presence of other people is a Bad Thing appeared to be regarded as so utterly self-evident that no further discussion was needed, but there are other ways of seeing things. Many years ago I read that while ‘quiet’ is generally seen as a good word in English, in some other languages it is pejorative. In some cultures ‘busy’ and ‘crowded’ are good words, because they suggest popularity, success and the safety of groups. For those of us who have grown up hearing ‘we had the place to ourselves’ as a recommendation, this shift in perspective is so extreme it almost makes the ground wobble, but sometimes it’s good to turn round and look at the world from a different angle.

So I enjoy living in a city that is smaller than many towns but which welcomes the equivalent of the population of London every year, and I will continue to be enchanted by people. The only thing I ask is that visitors choose either to stroll slowly or to walk three abreast. We have narrow streets so please pick one and don’t do both. Thank you.

Business travel

A few weeks ago I heard that one of my prints, ‘Boardwalk’, had been selected for the Ironbridge Fine Arts Printmaking Competition, so last weekend saw me making a trip down to Shropshire to hand it in. The three hour journey was just a bit too much to make both ways in one day* so my husband and I made it an overnight mini-break. To be honest, this sort of thing makes little business or financial sense; even on the assumption that the print sells, I will barely recoup the travel, accommodation, entry fee, gallery commission and framing costs. So that is why we mentally frame (no pun intended) trips like this as a pleasant jaunt during which we just happen to do some art business. For instance there was that time my husband went for a long weekend of walking in the Lake District; I went to Ulverston with him but, rather than accompany him walking, I passed the time by talking to visitors on my stand at the huge Printfest exhibition (which to be fair did actually make economic sense….just). We both enjoyed that trip so much we’re hoping to do it again next year.

This latest excursion was a lovely twenty four hours and introduced us to a beautiful part of the country we didn’t previously know. And while I was there I got to hand in my work to a prestigious exhibition and meet some delightful printmakers. Win win.

* I write of course as someone brought up in the UK. Other perceptions of distance are available. Our son who has settled in Canada now regards something 100 miles away as ‘nearby’ and a 40 minute drive as ‘local’. In fact I believe demonstrating the correct attitude to distance was part of his citizenship test.

In the studio

A quick update - yesterday I printed the penultimate layer on one of the two prints I showed you last time. This is a layer of transparent grey which finally pulls all the image together and varies across the print depending on what colours were already there; you can see from the block on the left where this layer has been printed. The single layer appears as grey shadow on the pale path while modifying the greens elsewhere. I now have to carve away nearly all the rest of the plate, leaving just the darkest bits of the image for a second layer of transparent grey.

The finished print will be ready in time for the…

York Printmakers Print Fair

Click here for full information and a map.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again soon with, hopefully, two finished prints. Meanwhile, please do chip in below with your thoughts on crowds, people, countryside and towns (or anything else).

Jane