Art In Action 2009 (Part Two)

This is the 2nd and final part of Art In Action images. I hope you enjoy them. Back to normal blogging next week. I apologise for some of the photography being skewiff but there were a lot of people to contend with there.

My thanks go to Dolores of True Blue Canadian for my latest blog award. Pop over and say hello to Dolores and for a look at her lovely blog.

This is my design called "The Sweetest Fruit". Another of my copyright free deer designs from my book although the tree is my own creation. Still lots more to come though. That book has proved a real bargain.

Pen and ink hen drawing, which makes a change as I am usually drawing cockerels.

This is called Art Deco Flowers and I am not totally happy with it. It hasn't lived up to its potential when I first sketched out the design. Perhaps the colours are wrong. I am not sure but I have only posted it because it took so long to create...haha. The individual flowers are nice but not with the stems. Anyway, you win some and you lose some...and this poor thing is definitely in the latter category.

Jane Mowat was the first person I came to in the printmaking marquee and her work is quite beautiful. It has a very textural and mythic quality. She is a very charming lady and gave us detailed explanations of how she prints. She produces her lovely prints by hand burnishing very uneven woodblocks. They are often slices of tree that she cuts the image into. If you enlarge the picture below you can see the slice of tree on her stand. I had to admire her industry as some of these blocks are huge and it must take ages to print by hand. Jane has a website here which shows that she does more than just printmaking.

Jane Mowat's prints at her stand

Flying Figure woodcut print

Detail of St. Francis and the Birds

Jane Mowat Print

This is Katherine Jones demonstrating collograph making in the printmaking marquee. Katherine's website is here.

Jane Freear-Wyld is a textile artist who weaves abstract images from manipulated digital photography. This piece below is only a section of the entire tapestry. I couldn't stand back far enough to get the whole thing in, but this gives an idea of the beautiful shapes and colours she produces. Jane has a website here. I actually found the website a bit of a challenge but you will see what I mean if you go for a peek.

Here is Jane demonstrating how she weaves her tapestries at her loom. She was more than happy to answer lots of questions about her work. The piece on the loom was a VERY complex weave with masses of colours and shapes.

Louise Gardiner had a beautifully colourful stand in the Market marquee. Louise is a well known embroideress who creates the most delicious images of figures, birds and flowers. Her best known images are her lovely ladies though. She has a very illustrative style and her pieces show a great sense of fun and laughter. Her website is here.

And here is one of her cupcake images on a Graffiti card I bought. I would love to own one of her original textile pieces.

These three views are of Nichola Theakston's marquee space. Nichola is a very successful sculptor of ceramic images of wildlife. I spent quite a while browsing the beautifully sculpted pieces on show. I particularly enjoyed her hares. She has a website here with lots of views of her work and also describes the process of building an armature and the preparatory sketches.

I love this little stripey fellow in the foreground. Not sure what he is though.

This is Rachael Howard's stand although I didn't get to see her in person. She is a very well known textile designer who creates delightful sketchy images and then appliques and embroiders them. Her work is very often amusing and she has a great gift for capturing situations and people around her with natural flair and freshness.

And here is one of her lovely designs in fabric applique and embroidery which I bought as a greetings card. (Yes, I bought a lot of cards whilst I was at the show).

I met artist Alison Ingram in the Nature In Art Marquee, but unfortunately I was so engrossed by her art that I forgot to take a photograph. Her work is absolutely amazing and so complex in design and colour and shape. She paints in traditional style as well as stylised. I could never paint in her style as I would get very confused, but she does it beautifully. She has a very comprehensive and vivid website here although the images below are from the handmade greetings cards I bought from her. I love all her work but I particularly like her birds. I think the coots below are my favourites although the avocets are gorgeous too.

Coot and Chicks

Five Fallow

Puffins On Wick

Sue Symond's is a needlework specialist and an artist. These pictures can't show the incredible beauty of her work. The displayed work on her stand related to a book of Creation which she has been working on for two years. It will consist of 60 pages of artwork with very detailed embroidery and exquisite painting. A sample of her work is shown here. The butterflies around the edges are all embroidered and the centre panel is painted. If you enlarge the picture you will get an idea of the true beauty of the piece. Sue lives in Somerset and is well known for her Bath Abbey Diptychs which can be seen here.

Sue Symond's book "Creation"

Some of the beautiful work on Sue Symond's stand

Miriam Maselkowski creates a style of work I haven't seen before. She creates pictures from nails and thread by wrapping the threads around hundreds of nails to give a 3D image. Sounds simple but I suspect from the detail in her work that it is a lot more complex than she describes it. This is Miriam below who I chatted to for several minutes. A very charming lady with a great talent and I wish her lots of luck in the future. Click on the images to get the full detail.

Oodles of Whimsey

This is Perched, a bit of whimsical graphic art.

This is a rather a romantic bit of symbolism connected to spring. I am not too sure that the watercoloured leaves and flowers work though. It may have been better to have left the entire drawing unpainted. It is entitled "Contemplating Spring"

The inspiration for this pen and ink image came from Robyn of Art Propelled Blog who illustrates some wonderful art and crafts on her blog. One of the illustrations was of a podlike vessel with a human head inside. I then had the idea that I would like to draw human heads and faces inside natural forms. This is the first of the series and this one is called Dandelion Head. Self explanatory really. The whole of the dandelion is cross hatched in my finest nibbed Rapidograph pen and took quite a few hours to draw.

And here is the photograph of a dandelion by Karl Blossfeldt in my Dover book which gave me the idea. The book is called Art Forms In The Plant World and has some great photos of plants and seed heads. Karl Blossfeldt was born in 1865 and he was a sculptor and art teacher who had a wonderful eye for detail.

You cannot help but fall in love with the images artist Freya Ete produces. Her delightfully whimsical pieces all have intriguing little bits of text which give meaning to the image. Her style is partly folk, partly naive, innocent but also very contemporary. She says that the words she paints come first before she decides on the picture and she has notebooks containing bits of poems, sayings etc where most artists would have sketchbooks full of pictures. Whatever she is doing is certainly working well for her anyway. She is a very successful artist and has an Etsy shop here and a website here with lots more to see.

This angel painting and the lovely linocut below are the work of artist and illustrator Diana Ludwig. You can see more of Diana's lovely paintings and prints on her website here.

I cannot resist any images of people with birds on their heads. It follows, therefore, that I love Christopher Marvell's work. He is a sculptor of some wonderful works which you can find on his website here and also at Ainscough Contemporary Art gallery here. He lives and works in St. Ives and who could be stuck for inspiration in that lovely part of Cornwall. My other favourites are his hares and angels. This is Birdmanhead.

Bronze Owl Woman

I love this drypoint etching of Christopher Marvell's. It is so simple, contemporary and witty.

The two tapestries below were created by Finnish textile artist Aino Kajaniemi. She has a lovely loose technique and some of her tapestries look as if they have been drawn. The lines are beautifully delicate. She has her own website here which is well worth a look. Some of her work can also be found on the FibreScene site here.

This is a bit of intriguing carving that I discovered and photographed on the wall of St. Dunstan's Church, Monks Risborough a couple of years ago. The church has origins dating back to 1150 but this carving is obviously much more recent. There is very little to be found out about it though. It looks very stylised. What I particularly like about it was the lovely sandstone texture.

Guy Taplin has many admirers of his bird sculptures and I have joined the throng with this piece. It represents shorebirds and is wonderfully red and battered looking. I am not normally a fan of the distressed look but this is just right for these birds. The work looks as if it has been left to the elements for several years and has aged beautifully.

The exceptionally talented Jeanie Tomanek is the artist who produced the images below. Her work is full of myth and mystery. I find it quite magical. She is inspired by many things including folklore, literature and myths, feelings and dreams. She explains her work much better than I can on her Artist's Statement on her website here. If you like her work, you will love a visit to her website as she has over 150 paintings displayed in the gallery.

Evening

East Of Eden

Small Craft Warning

Between

House On A Hill

Diary

Quilt
Aren't hens and cockerels wonderful? I have always been fascinated by these birds. Such an amazing variety of sizes, feather colour and pattern, shapes of combs and wattles. So much going on with such a common, unassuming bird. They have provided myself and other artists with endless inspiration for all sorts of art and craft works. They are so recongnisable that they can lend themselves to heavy stylisation and abstraction and still we know exactly what they are. They are probably the most drawn, painted, etched, embroidered, linocutted, collaged, woven, sculpted and photographed of all members of the bird world. I think their gentle clucking to themselves is one of the most relaxing of sounds in the animal world. Such a shame we cannot all keep a flock of them at the end of the garden such as happened in times gone by. Until then I will just carry on drawing them.