Autumn and talented friends

Autumn already, and for me the start of a new project. I always love starting new things in the Autumn – I’m still tuned into the old school year I suppose, so it seems like the right time to be starting something.

Getting this project off the ground should be easy – I’ve been working with the theme (female magicians) for over a year now, doing research for the book I’m writing – but I have to admit it’s off to kind of a slow start. So far I’ve done one test print just to get some ideas going but there’s a enormous amount of preparatory work to be done before I can really make headway. I’m also using this time to re-examine the way I work, as I’m worried I’ve become too set in my ways and that the end result will suffer and not be as good as it could be. One downside of having become so focused over the past couple of years is that I realise I may not be giving myself any room to explore and experiment. I need to address this before much progress can be made.

I’ve been very lucky this year to have made the acquaintance of some great artists and to have been able to spend a bit of time with them just chatting about work and stuff. It makes a huge difference to my outlook be able to do this. Art is so much about communicating but it’s amazing how little of that actually happens in the day to day life of an artist (at least the ones I know!), especially with other artists. I think this is part of the reason why I love printmaking so much – because of the workshop and being around other people making work and getting to see what they’re doing. I love it.

Recently I got to meet up with Roxana Halls again and to see her amazing studio in London. It’s in the disused bar of an old theatre that has been a bingo hall for many years. The room is enormous – it makes my studio look like a store cupboard – and still has the actual wooden bar stretching along one side of it. It’s full of books and all the materials that she works with and lots of wonderful weird things (I got to see some the sets that she built for her series of paintings Tingle Tangle which are basically works of art in their own right). Seeing other people’s studios is such a rare treat, and this one is really quite special. As if that wasn’t enough, another treat that day was to meet Roxana’s friend, the extremely talented Frances Borden. As luck would have it she had some of her work there with her and I had a chance to have a look (I had already seen photos of her work but not first hand) and I thought it was beautiful and genuine; she has such a wonderfully intimate style.

Talking of talented friends, today is a momentous day as the lovely Nova Ren Suma’s book Dani Noir officially comes out in America (available on Amazon and in book shops) and I’m so proud of her as this is her first published novel – although she has ghost written loads of them. I’ve known her for many years and I’m just extremely excited for her, as well as being excited to read it myself when it comes out here.

Cover from Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma, published by Aladdin / Simon & Schuster

My own work has been released into the wild recently as all fifteen prints from my series A Sage of the Stage, not a Beast in a Cage are currently very far from home, up in Thurso on the northern tip of mainland Scotland as part of a magic themed touring exhibition organised by Highland Council. I wish I could go up there and see the exhibition as I’d love to visit that part of the country but unfortunately I can’t. I will however, go and see it when it makes its way to Inverness in November where the show will be at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.

As a result of my solo exhibition in Glasgow over the summer, I’m happy to say I now have gallery representation in that lovely city at the Mansfield Park Gallery. It’s a great little gallery representing some excellent artists so I’m very pleased.

As one exhibition is about to end…

The past few weeks have been so busy it’s actually difficult to remember what’s been happening. After the opening of the exhibition in Glasgow I had one day off (where I basically felt ill all day) and then went headlong into more deadlines and festival activities. The talk that I did at the West Port Book Festival went really well and thankfully drew in a large audience. I really enjoyed it, and it was great to have to put so much thought into what I’ve spent the past 2 and a half years working on and actually talk about it. I even managed to include a taster of what an actual learned pig act might have been like with the aid of a toy pig, some number cards and a very silly magic trick. Not sure the audience were entirely convinced of the sagacity of the stuffed pig but they seemed to like it nonetheless.

On the exhibitions front the show in Glasgow is now in its final week and will finish on the 5th September, after which it will all go up to Inverness for the touring show Now You See It with Highland Council until February 2010. And I’m pleased to announce that I now have a space in London to exhibit the series in May 2010 at artsdepot, which looks like a great venue and I’m really looking forward to that.

In the meantime, three pieces from the series will go on show in Newcastle at a group show on a vintage theme called Past in Present at The Art Works Galleries during September and October. My friends Annabel De Vetten and Chantal Powell are also going to be in this exhibition. The opening for that is this Thursday but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it down.

Next week I’ll be in London where I’ll be meeting up with Roxana Halls once again to see her studio, which I’m very excited about. I’ll also be going to see The Bay, a play that my friend Rachel Stevenson is in, which was running at Te Pooka’s Big Red Door during the festival and has now transferred to Theatre 503 in London and runs until 11 September.

Incidently, it’s a bit late now, but I really meant to write a blog post earlier in the festival and mention some friend’s exhibitions and events such as Carmen Moran’s mini exhibition Kunst Im Klo (Art in the Loo) at the Glasite Meeting House, Madeleine Shepherd’s exhibition and collaboration with Writers Bloc Alba Ad Astra at Transreal Fiction and Gav Inglis series of spoken word nights Underword at Fingers Piano Bar. Oh well, better late than never? Hmmm.

One sunny day in April

I love my little research trips down to London. The early morning train ride down has become an opportunity to read a whole book without having to stop and a space to think without the usual distractions, accompanied by the rituals of a flask of instant coffee and a bagel from the stall in the station (which sadly is actually the best bagel place I’ve found in Edinburgh). Once off the train I make my way along the road to the British Library where I allow myself a brief stop at the cafe before a couple of hours in the Rare Books & Music reading room, then it’s off to The Magic Circle library until early evening, usually followed by a take away and a beer at my friend Tracy’s house and nodding off on the sofa after a long day. The next day it’s back to the British Library and then usually a mad rush to finish reading in time to catch the train back home in the afternoon. Cue return journey ritual of another book and mini bottle of wine.

Rarely on these trips do I allow myself any digression from my main purpose of the visit. The short time span doesn’t really allow for anything else. On my last visit, however, a mixture of planning and chance led to a very different kind of day and a great one it was too.

I had already planned to go and see Roxana Halls‘ exhibition Tingle Tangle at the National Theatre, and was delighted when the opportunity arose to actually meet up with her there for a chat. Since The Magic Circle was closed for the bank holiday I figured I would spend part of the day as usual at the British Library as well as meeting Roxana, but on arrival discovered the reading rooms there were also closed for the day, so I made my way to the National Theatre slightly ahead of schedule, only to find that it too was closed! For some reason it never crosses my mind that things might actually be closed on bank holidays, and I also kind of have this idea that everything in London is just open all the time, so by this time I was actually feeling quite confused and wondering if I was just going to have to spend the entire day wandering around shops I couldn’t afford to buy anything in.

Once Roxana arrived we decided just to go and have a coffee anyway, as it looked like the theatre might open later on that day, and I ended up having a thoroughly good day just chatting about art and galleries and such like. It’s actually quite rare that I get the chance to just talk about stuff with another artist like that, and it really made me realise that it’s something I need to do more often. It was a lovely sunny day on the South Bank, and two coffees and about 4 hours later we realised the theatre had finally opened its doors for the evening performances and we could get in to see the exhibition.

I’d already seen many of the pieces in the exhibition on Roxana’s website, and even although I was really excited about seeing them in real life I wasn’t quite prepared for the scale and impact of them. I have to say it’s not that often that I find a contemporary artist who’s work actually moves me but these paintings definitely did. The amount of work that has gone into their execution is staggering, not only in the actual painting of them but also all of the research, preparation, making of props etc. Pieces such as Terina the Paper Tearer and Inferna the Human Torch depict performers in an extraordinary imaginary cabaret. The accompanying photographs that are on display give some idea of the process and are a great addition to the work on show. The characters, the performers, that Roxana has created, stay with you long after leaving the exhibition, as does the final image of a burned out, bombed out city where a lone woman sets a table for tea in an exposed room, below her lie the remains of a theatre – the location perhaps of the silent cabaret. The exhibition is on until the end of May, so do go and see it if you get the chance.

It’s around us

Today I moved out of my large sunny 2nd floor studio overlooking Arthur’s Seat on one side and Portobello on the other, and moved into my new studio on the ground floor of the same building. The new studio, once all of my stuff was in, looked a bit like a store cupboard when I left it this afternoon, rather than a place I’m going to be spending a great deal of time in – but tomorrow it gets a makeover, and I’m feeling really positive about the move (which was for financial reasons) and looking on the bright side: having people around me since it’s a semi-shared space as opposed to the solitude of the old one, having doors direct to the outside world for sunny days,  and never again having to cause myself bodily harm hauling framed artworks up and down the stairs whenever I have an exhibition.

The past couple of weeks have been the usual hard work and relentless list ticking off, but a number of nice things have eased the pain. Afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel for my cousin’s 50th birthday, another trip to London and The Magic Circle for research, where I also met up with a magician friend Will Houston (who’s book has just come out) to talk magic history over lunch, the opening of a friend’s exhibition in Glasgow – FeltusFeltus, Domestic Zirkus at the Citizen’s Theatre – which is getting rave reviews and is also showing at the Whitecross Gallery in London, and my own little bit of good news: that I will be showing some pieces from the learned animals series of screenprints A Sage of the Stage, Not a Beast in a Cage at The Magic Circle Collector’s Day in May. I also got to see the invites for my show in August at the Tron Theatre which are looking good.

And something to look forward to this weekend, Hauntings: The Science of Ghosts at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, where amongst other things, stage illusionist Paul Kieve will be talking about staging ghost effects in the theatre – can’t wait!

And as if that weren’t enough, the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album comes out on Monday!