Now where was I.....

I have a feeling I was half way through a print

Hello

It’s not like me to send a newsletter at the weekend, so I apologise if I am intruding on your leisure time, but I am feeling I need to catch up a bit.

When I last wrote I had printed the first three layers of a reduction linoprint and was expecting to whizz through the remaining layers. This all went to pot because of:

1. deciding it needed an extra layer (another shade of green) in the middle

2. the arrival of cold, damp weather which slows down ink drying dramatically

3. completely forgetting that I was about to be hit by a huge amount of computer work for York Open Studios (more of that below)

Anyway, I have now finally printed the penultimate layer. I do like the word penultimate, derived of course from the Latin for ‘wine soon’. Here’s a video of that most recent layer being printed; it’s transparent grey which gently darkens where it prints. I realised two prints from the end that I had forgotten to add driers to the ink, so what with that and Storm Babet this layer will take even longer to dry - see point 2 above.

This is what the print looked like after the addition of that grey layer. The slowness of pulling back the print is not for dramatic effect but because after so many layers of ink the paper sticks to the block.

If you have your sound turned up and can hear some psychedelic 60s pop playing in the background, this post by Tom Cox explains what was playing in the studio at the time. I really recommend it, as I also recommend all of Tom’s writing, especially his novel Villager from which this music was born.

There is just one more layer to go on this reduction print, after which there will be that wine. The last layer will be a brownish grey, or greyish brown, on just the trunks and branches. This means the final session of carving before that will be particularly destructive as I brutally clear away all the remaining areas of foliage rather than carefully picking out individual leaves. This can be either anxiety-inducing or cathartic, depending on my mood at the time.

I hope to get everything finished in the next few days.

So, what about point 3 above?

What Do Artists Do All Day? (#97)

Since 2014 I have been involved with organising York Open Studios, a non-profit venture run entirely by volunteers and one of the biggest annual festivals in York (which has a lot of festivals). We are immensely proud of delivering what has become a highlight of the York calendar every year, especially when you consider that by definition we are organising artists. The phrase ‘herding cats’ is used more than it perhaps should be. Somewhere along the line I appear to have become the person who transforms all the information sent in by artists via an online form into coherent and consistent entries for the directory and website.

Mid-October is when artists have to send us all the details of where they are exhibiting and what they are showing. It arrives on my computer in a huge* Excel database and then the work begins of creating nice columns of readable text.
* 158 entries this year

My first job is sorting out the venue addresses so our map designer can crack on and create a logical trail around York and the surrounding villages. Do you know how many different ways people write addresses? And did you know that a lot of people don’t know where the space goes in a postcode, or even that it’s meant to have a space? Or be written in upper case? My admiration for postal workers always goes up at this time of year. People love to grumble about Royal Mail but honestly it’s a miracle anything reaches the right place at all.

I’ve just about done that now, along with standardising phone numbers which people also give in an imaginative range of spacing formats. (This is what comes of working with artists). My next really big task is proof reading and editing all the blocks of text submitted as work descriptions and biographies. If you’re an artist, you see, when you are asked for a simple, clear description of your work in no more than 30 words and written in the third person, what this obviously means is 100 words of flowery artist statement written in the first person.

In entirely unrelated news, I am stepping down from the organising committee after the 2024 York Open Studios…

Anyway, I hope that when next April comes around you will enjoy visiting all our artists in their studios. We have visitors from all over the UK and even abroad so I will not accept distance as an excuse. I am sure you will also be suitably impressed by the clarity and precision of the (free) directory. ‘What perfect editing’ you will cry, possibly shedding a tear of joy. I will of course bang on about this nearer the time to make sure you don’t forget.

My plan is that when I next write I will have finished the print I showed you at the beginning of this letter, and yes I know I’ve said that before, thank you.

Until then, thanks as always for reading and have a good weekend.

Jane