Sunday 17 March 2013

17th March 2013

I've finished getting work ready for Bologna Children's Book Fair - and it is out of my hands and on its way with the rest of the work for the Cambridge School of Art stand.  Looking forward to going to the  Fair next week - it'll be my first time and I think I will enjoy it enormously.

I am now giving some attention to the 366 little books that I made last year.  Have been thinking about how I am going to show them at the Fenners groups show in June.  Here are some of them:

Thursday 14 March 2013

14th March 2013

Have been very busy recently preparing drawings and dummy books for Bologna Children's Book Fair.  Excited to be going for the first time this year.  And pleased that I will have work on show on the Cambridge School of Art stand.  Here's an image from my book about two sisters, "My Sister Likes".






This week I was supposed to be going to Paris for a couple of days with my husband, but because of heavy snow in Northern France all Eurostar trains were cancelled so we found ourselves stranded in London and decided to make the most of it. Yesterday we went to  “Lichenstein: A Retrospective” at Tate Modern. Fascinating to see Roy Lichenstein’s paintings in the flesh. I had thought of them as conceptual works, making a point about comic books and mass-produced images.  So it was a delightful surprise to meet the real paintings. I hadn’t appreciated that these works are not exactly copies, parodies or celebrations: the best ones seem more like translations, with the paint being an important part of the work, rather than just a means of execution.  Personal favourites were the early comic book works, the seascapes - some of these used layers of stencilled dots in different colours creating star patterns in the spaces between them, and the mirror room - Briget Riley like explorations creating the illusion of reflected light with the simplest of changing dots and the odd curved line.

Also saw some modern African textiles at the British Museum.  Although the many dotted areas in these stunning prints are made with stamps they leave you with the same impression as the stencilled dots in Lichenstein’s paintings: in both, the groups of dots have been created by hand in a careful, watchful process.

Highlight of yesterday was Rosemarie Trockel's show at the Serpentine, very inspiring, exciting work.  Also saw the film Lore which I loved.