Gentle gentrification

As a member of Walking the Land, the first Friday of every month takes me on a drawing walk in the Stroud area. This print (vinyl cut with wooden and metal letterpress) is the result of a walk in Edge, a village near Painswick, and a discussion about land ownership and the extensive renovation of old farms in the area. There was no upper case P in the metal Bodoni typeface I chose for the phrase locating the hamlet of Paradise, but I realised that without it, the phrase becomes a relevant twist on the expression the grass is greener. This print is currently part of an exhibition at The Old Passage restaurant at Arlingham, on the banks of the river Severn.

Doublets word game

Doublets is a word game invented by Lewis Carroll. The rules were published in Vanity Fair Magazine in 1879:

The rules of the Puzzle are simple enough. Two words are proposed, of the same length; and the Puzzle consists in linking these together by interposing other words, each of which shall differ from the next word in one letter only. That is to say, one letter may be changed in one of the given words, then one letter in the word so obtained, and so on, till we arrive at the other given word.

I love the poetic flow this game creates, and have been using it in my current work.
The overprinted version is a photoshop experiment. I will try the real thing on press, using colour overprinting.

Going round in circles

A latin palindrome describing the behaviour of moths: in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni which translates as: we go wandering (in circles) at night and are consumed by fire.

I want to print letterpress in circles. The print shown here is a rough hand-printed version from loose metal type. I now have a type high (23.3mm) metal circle template to build up to the correct circumference (or do I mean diameter?) for setting on the press bed with flexible thin leading. Just not sure how I will fix the letter spacing as it moves round the circle. Work in progress... 
 

Émail. First attempt

French for enamel is émail*. No computer technology involved in painting liquid enamel (powdered glass) on to copper plates, drawing into the enamel once dry, and then firing in a kiln at 800 degrees celsius.
Wonderful to watch the unpredictable (to me) colours that appear as the metal cools, and to see the black firescale crack and jump off the copper where no enamel has been applied. An addictive process. This photo misses the gloss of the enamel and the gleam of the copper.

* Appearance of random bits of french due to french husband.

Laser cut agricultural music

After a long gap, another posting. Samples of laser cutting on wood and a laurel leaf. I have no idea what these esoteric symbols mean, but I call them agricultural music. Watching the laser beam is fascinating: apparently random jumping as it cuts, not a systematic start at one end of the image as I would have imagined. Then a wonderful bonfire smell when the cutting is complete. Hi-tech mixes with memories of my childhood garden.

Fish on Friday

A bit of a hybrid: the head from an experimental Gyotaku print made with a bream, collaged on a wooden letterpress print body. This print is currently on show at The Old Passage Inn in Arlingham, Gloucestershire, in a fish-themed exhibition.
Gyotaku is a Japanese print method. Fishermen painted their catch with non-toxic paint and then covered the fish with shoji paper and rubbed gently to transfer an image to the paper. The fishermen then had proof of the size of their fish.
Gyo = fish, Taku = rubbing or print.

Let's start at the very beginning

 

I couldn't decide where to start with my new blog, then realised it had to be this: a drawing of me drawing on January 19th 1962, 3 weeks before my 3rd birthday. It comes from a sheet of drawings made by my father (Kenneth Oliver) at our house in Prestbury. Good to be still drawing 50 years later!