This month we’ve had several family visitors, my youngest son graduated from Sheffield University (with a 2:1 whoop-whoop) and it’s been very hot in parts, too hot to work, however I’ve managed to do a lot of things such as taking part on an excellent online course run by Sally Hirst called ‘Confident Composition’:

https://sallyhirst.co.uk/confident-composition/

Sally is also an art historian and educator and encouraged us to watch ‘the paradox of choice’ by Barry Schwartz, a very amusing and pertinent TED short talk made some ten years ago : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM&ab_channel=TED

I read a couple of books about Joan Eardley: https://joaneardley.com/ and a lot of the back catalogues of exhibitions of the Scottish Gallery on Issuu:

https://issuu.com/scottishgallery

I especially enjoyed ‘Towards Abstraction’ by John Brown and the catalogues on the exhibitions of Duncan Shanks; I found reading about how other artist’s plan and prepare their work very interesting . Reading about Joan again (she’s long been one of my favourite artists) made me do some sketching outdoors in Central Park and currently I’m working out ways of making these into screen prints at the Printery (where I shall be ‘Printmaker of the Month’ for August!)

https://www.theprinterystudio.co.uk/

Went to see the PV of the summer show at the lovely Make SW gallery in Bovey Tracey: https://www.crafts.org.uk/current and especially enjoyed the large set of prints by Barton Hargreaves and the colourful jewellery for sale in the shop. Luckily I didn’t take much money with me so couldn’t buy anything.

Also saw the AUP (formerly Plymouth College of Art) BA Hons 3D craft summer show in Regent Street, very interesting work all made to a high standard, and particularly loved the fishing-industry based plates and the work of Suzi Humphries.

Print wise, I’ve been working on making tusche screen prints with Sue Lewry, one of my contemporaries on the MA (https://www.suelewry.com/projects), because tusches give you a more painterly way of making screen prints; if you’re interested see: https://lascaux.ch/en/products/brushes-printmaking-sets-various/lascaux-tusches - I’ve also been making hybrid screen prints by drawing with a tusche then with linocut overprinting based on the seed-heads of cow parsley to see how it works out; I really enjoy the ‘drawing’ part of the process so I’ll continue my experimentation. I want to make some larger scale hybrid prints too so I have lots to think about…

Working with Sue who is very focused and organised made me realise that I needed to move myself forward business-wise so I’ve been on several boot camps and workshops run by Outset (https://www.outset.org/plymouth/) on how to set up and run a small business and I’ve finally - after much prevarication - added my shop to my website, although now of course I’ll have to get up to speed on all the social media networks:)

https://www.viviennespencer.com/available-artworks