May 2022 - 'Grey Dead Concrete' | Intaglio Experiments (Xcut Xpress)

New work - ‘Grey Dead Concrete’

I spent most of May working hard to complete this 42x42cm stippled artwork entitled ‘Grey Dead Concrete’.

‘Grey Dead Concrete’, 2022, 42x42cm ink, acrylic and watercolour pencil on paper.

It hurt like hell, especially the final 18 hours of stippling over two days, but I think it was all worth it. The subject is a Red Deadnettle in flower, poking through a cracked concrete track. It reminds me of the Ben E. King track Spanish Harlem and I suppose it is loosely complimentary to the idea that you can find beauty in unpromising places. Apart from depicting the evident power that many plants and fungi have over human structures (Pavement Mushrooms are well-known to push their fruits up through solid concrete and asphalt) this drawing was actually about my personal journey into foraging. This is a plant that most people will have seen if they spent time walking outside city centres but it was only in the past year that I became aware of it being edible and actually quite a nice thing to nibble on. Not a showstopper but if you pluck the top few leaves and the flowers early on a sunny morning then you have a slightly sweet simple garnish with the added bonus of beautiful little flowers.

Detail from ‘Grey Dead Concrete’, 2022.

The artwork took roughly 80 hours in total. I stippled the entire scene before adding a base of watercolour pencil to the plant, and then clarified its shape and tones with acrylics to get the desired contrasts.

Intaglio Experiments (Xcut Xpress)

After much umming and ahing I finally managed to snap up an Xcut Xpress die-cutting machine on eBay. I don’t really have any spare money at the moment but I couldn’t resist dipping into savings for this £90 purchase. You see, they have become cult objects because they also excel as portable printing presses. It looks like a sandwich press but folds out into a decent solid bed. The metal roller wheel is adjustable so you can apply the perfect amount of pressure as you crank the hefty plastic print bed through.

After purchasing some compressed printing felt and some newsprint I returned to Tetrapak printing. I have been etching the foil cartons and inking with Akua Intaglio inks. Wetted Fabriano paper seems to do the trick so far. My first subjects were charismatic Romney Marsh churches; St Thomas a Beckett at Fairfield, and St Augustine’s at Brookland.

‘Church of St Augustine, Brookland’, 2022, intaglio from Tetrapak (orange juice carton).

Small pieces at around 10x17cm but I was more than happy with the results of this cheap and fairly ethical method of printing. After all - Tetrapak cartons are almost un-recyclable in the UK so anything that provides them with a valuable second life is a huge plus. That said, I have also bought some new lino to play with so as ever my eco-credentials aren’t entirely squeaky clean.

‘Thomas a Beckett, Fairfield’ [top], ‘Church of St Augustine, Brookland’ [bottom], intaglio on orange juice Tetrapak carton.

Looks to me like they have a lot of promise. I will learn a lot from this new toy!

There are three prints of each of these so far. Available (cheaply) for sale.

That’s all for now. I have plenty of potential projects on the go but all are in my mind at the moment. Hopefully June will yield some interesting new results.

January 2022 - Rye Society of Artists Spring show | New artworks

I have kicked off the year with some resolve to better focus on my own work. Fewer commissions, more continuous improvement and getting back to my original reasons for becoming an artist - to transliterate the images and ideas in my head out of my head. Here’s hoping that doesn’t lead to poverty!

Rye Society of Artists’ Spring Show

I am delighted to be able to report that I have been invited to exhibit alongside the Rye Society of Artists with a view to becoming a member. I have exhibited at each of their past three shows (2018, 2019, 2021) and now have a chance to be voted in, or not… I have not decided which pieces will best represent me but I am allowed to show 4, plus a small display of sketchbooks or paraphernalia (likely to be the latter as my sketchbooks are usually more notes that drawings).

The Spring Show will open on Saturday 19th March and run until Sunday April 24th so that’s a wonderful chance to showcase my work. It is actually the first time that I will be formally hanging my work in this way so it is really quite exciting!

I’ll announce the show properly in due course.

New Artworks

I have finished a few pieces recently so here’s a quick roundup of the completed work that’s come from my studio in the past couple of months. Click on the images to read more about them or to view them in my shop:

‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’, pen, watercolour, acrylic on paper.

‘Humming’, oil on canvas.

‘Tilder Gill’, acrylic on board, 5x7 inches, not yet available for sale (but will be soon).

‘Pelsham 4’, acrylic on board, 7x5 inches. Not yet for sale.

So a bit of variety there. As ever it’s great to play and find a style that works for each piece I imagine. A nightmare for anyone trying to identify my work, I suppose. Apart from the stippled work as that does now seem to be gaining a strong identity of its own. Which is nice.

Thanks for reading and viewing, I’ll update soon with news of the pieces going into the Spring Show.

September 2021 - New artwork 'Aesop, thwarted' | Experimentation - Tetra Pak

Many artists suffered from a creative drought during the deepest weird of the pandemic but I seemed merrily aloof from it and just kept creating. This summer though I felt completely drained of creativity despite wanting to work every day. I carry the lingering sense of loss from lockdown version one in 2020. I deeply miss the revealed vision of what a re-ordered and world could be like. Seeing everything slotting thoughtlessly back into the same tired grooves as before seems like some sort of coping mechanism for society but I pine for the missed opportunity. Quieter roads and improved sleep, the lack of road soot on the windowsill, seeing people enjoying the outdoors when and where they never did before, learning the names of things and foraging, being able to just stop and reconsider things for a bit, and to treasure being alive instead of fretting at being unable to inflate a car tyre because of an enormous petrol station queue.

A few weeks ago I felt the volcano of creativity coming back as the annual summer holiday tourist crowds stopped scaring me off the streets, and then suddenly I could make new work again.

New artwork - ‘Aesop thwarted’

This piece is taken from a real-life view in St Leonards-on-Sea. It sparked some meandering thoughts and I was perfectly poised to make this the work that drew me out of that desert. If you want to read a little more about it then it can be found here. I always intended to use watercolour pencil over the stippling for this work because the glow of the mossy branch is just too lovely to leave monochrome. Along with my other work ‘A housing crisis’, from last year, I think there is a time and a place for setting aside my assertion that people’s brains colourise a monochrome scene automatically. I like the idea that humans ‘see’ colour even when there isn’t any, like supposedly seeing edges to objects in reality - can you ever actually draw the outline of a tree or can you only just suggest its form? The hyper-natural colour of mosses in a built environment now sometimes leave me unable to resist. The atomisation of the form in this series of work continues as I remove all the drawn lines, and I’m not too fussy about colour bleed on plant drawings either as it reminds me of movement. I’m working towards depicting a sense of things.

Experimentation - Tetra Pak

I recently heard that you could cut open Tetra Pak containers and use them for printing. Having fought a lot of internal battles over sustainability and waste I was getting super-frustrated with discoveries that the local council was no longer taking this kind of packaging for recycling, despite it being one of the best ways of cutting back on my dairy consumption and the only way of getting certain legumes. Hearing that printing might give the waste a second use was intriguing. There are lots of tutorials available online, but basically you etch the foil surface with a metal point and ink the ‘plate’ before pressing it. I’ve got a long way to go before I get the results I want but here are some examples of hand-pressed plates on my first attempts.

An inked plate depicting my work ‘Fang’ from earlier this year.

Lots wrong with this but a fascinating start.

A better result that taught me a lot about the wetness of the paper and the inking method.

That’s all for now, I need to try and make some new work today. Fingers crossed.

April 2021 - New artworks | RWA Open Exhibition closes soon | Twitter

April 2021

It’s been another funny period at the start of this year. A malaise seeped into my creative processes at the same time as lockdowns re-established and a general atmosphere of grinding ‘nothingness’ covered everything. I resolved to re-think how I think and where I find inspiration. Making specific time to read, learn, walk, observe, whenever I’m not actively creating. That began to pay dividends when momentum slowly came back into the world via the vaccination programme.

As a result of today’s several hours of art admin I was surprised to discover that I had already completed 18 artworks so far in 2021. That’s vastly more work than I expected and might also go some way to explaining why I’ve been a bit tired recently. It’s a contradiction for me to say that I have experienced a malaise when I have also been more productive than ever, but that’s just how it is. Productivity isn’t the goal, ever. Exploration is the goal.

I’ve just taken two weeks off from active creating and instead walked widely over the local area. Almost 100 miles in short walks. Foraging, learning the shapes of the plants, listening to birds, feeling the sun come back. Then I’ve come home and rested, thought, cooked, drunk (too much), and watched films. It has been tremendous despite the lingering lockdown. I’m looking forward to the rest of the year immensely.

New artworks

I won’t share all of my new artworks in this newsletter but here are a few selected pieces freshly framed and available in my shop for purchase. Most are at temporarily low prices while people get back into the swing of consuming art but do get in touch if you wanted to make a reasonable offer or wanted to discuss a reserving an artwork.

Most of these have come from walks or thinking about walks. Experiencing weather or the feeling a landscape instills in me. Some represent what I would call experiments or evolutions in subject matter or technique.

‘In praise of February sun’, 2021, ink, pencil and acrylic on paper.

‘The party on the lake’, 2021, acrylic on canvas board.

‘Sometimes fire is not the answer’, 2021, ink on paper.

‘The Long Man in the rain’, 2021, acrylic on canvas board.

‘The Field near Playden', 2021, acrylic on canvas board.

Art sales are slowly picking up again so by the time you read this at least one of the above pieces has sold. Any questions please do pose them to me.

RWA Open 168 Exhibition closes soon

The Royal West of England Academy’s 168th Open Exhibition closes on May 9th so you have literally days left to get to see the show. It is gutting that I haven’t been able to travel there myself to see my contribution ‘Let go’, truly awful to not be able to see my work in the biggest show yet.

Sigh.

But anyway you can book tickets via this link https://www.rwa.org.uk/collections/art-exhibitions/products/rwa-168-annual-open-exhibition if you do fancy catching it before it closes.

At least when I have to drive up to Chelsea to pick up ‘Let Go’ and take it home again I will also be taking another from the same series, ‘Anbid’, to a top-level digitisation company and getting a huge scan made of that piece. Silver linings and all that.

Twitter - @chrisboothart

I’m rubbish at remembering I also have a Twitter account but I have been trying to make it a bit more interesting recently. If you’re more of a Twitter user than an Instagrammer then you can find me over on Twitter here. It won’t be a verbatim copy of Instagram but it also won’t be comprehensive. It’ll be more of a side-step and me tinkering with a different way of chatting into the void.

Newsletters

When I take three months off from posting newsletters, like I just did, I can find myself losing track of exactly what I’ve been up to. Thanks for reading. I do see that a few people take the time to do so and it is useful to me to have these little check-ins with myself. Until next time do keep well, and I hope your springtimes are beautiful.

December 2020 - New artwork 'Anbid' | Royal West of England Academy Open 168 delayed

DECEMBER 2020

Well that was the year that was. I’m not going to say anything else about that in this intro.

New artwork - ‘Anbid’

I completed my largest and most time-consuming drawing to-date in mid-December. Measuring 1.5m x 0.75m and consisting entirely of individual dots this stippled artwork marks an important turning point in my thinking, with some new themes and a lot more colour to come in 2021.

‘Anbid’, 2020, 1.5m x 0.75m, ink on paper (yet to be digitised)

'Anbid', an Old English word meaning 'Waiting, hope, expectation', is the name of my newest artwork.

As usual the length of time needed to produce the work leads to a web of meditation and additions to the meaning behind it. The title was chosen months ago but I always intended this piece to be a bridge between my Disintegration Series and what comes next. At the start of the Covid lockdown in the UK I was struck by the public reclaiming their gardens and patios. Seeds sold out, compost was scarce. There was a beautiful moment of pause and deliberation, a refocusing on what lies around us. I saw a future paradise where we emerged from a wrecked world (of a much worse cataclysm) into rewilded public/private spaces and under-tended gardens. Nooks for thinking and resting. Groves for the commons and commoners.

At the same time the snarling political discourses quietly left alone Brexit and its harkening back to the Good Old Days™ of some mis-imagined English Golden Age (which is why I started thinking about Anglo Saxon) in favour of some weird fatalistic new blitz spirit entirely of our own making. Austerity killing off tens of thousands of people under the anti-aegis of laissez-faire politics. Government could have done so much more to protect people but our electoral choices made sure that no matter how loudly we banged our pots and pans it would always fail to protect us.

I originally chose this lichen covered branch as the subject because lichen is a symbiosis. It is a bellwether and obvious indicator of environmental conditions. They are ancient and fascinating. In the first place I wanted to make a piece of art that spoke of what we need to achieve with the planet, pretty damn quickly. What I got was something that also describes my anger at how we are letting things slip all around us.

Anbid and me are looking forward to something better.

RWA Open Exhibition 2020 - delayed

Sadly but predictably the Royal West of England Academy’s Open Exhibition for 2020 has been delayed until the national lockdown ends. They have extended the period that the show will be open until April 11th 2021 though, so there may eventually be a fleeting opportunity to view ‘Kerala, rewilding’ out in the wilds of Bristol.

‘Kerala, rewilding’ will eventually be viewable until Bristol, until April 11th 2021. In theory.

Until next time, keep safe x

August 2020 - Hastings Open: open | Mailing list | Thoughts on pricing for 'A new normal' | Seaford studies

August 2020:

Hastings Open 2020 is now open

As of August 27th Hastings Open 2020 is open to the public at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, and will be until 3rd January 2021. Having visited it last weekend I was very proud to have ‘Let go’ picked for this show. This piece sits in the main room of the exhibition and rests in excellent company. The range of art being exhibited is wide and exciting.

Plenty of well-known local names are among the exhibitors, plus many from further afield. Most artworks are for sale and to be honest there are a lot of bargains there. The website for this exhibition is here.

Me and ‘Let go’ (top) at Hastings Open 2020

Hastings Museum and Gallery is worth a visit in its own right, and not just for its collection - the building is stunning too.

Mailing list

I thought I would establish an email mailing list to share details of new shows, new work, new news every month or so. When there is news. If you would like to receive these updates you can sign up from the form on my About Me page, or right here:

‘A new normal‘ - Pricing artwork and the race to the bottom

It is sadly endemic that artists seem to constantly undervalue their work. For whatever reason. I have often been guilty of that as well. This is not the reason why ‘Let go’ is priced quite highly for the Hastings Open, I should add, because I have priced it steeply.

I don’t want art to be out of reach of modest budgets, and I’m obviously not in this for the megabucks, but I do think that low prices can mask the effort that goes into creating any art. Unless you are already an ‘emerging artist’ we can too easily end up with a race to the bottom and a climate where art is seen as mass-produced, consumable, and ultimately little more than a disposable wall covering.

The artist support pledge that arose during the Covid lockdown was an invaluable way for creatives to pool cheaper work and try to create a circular economy of mutual support - globally. The £200 / $200 / €200 maximum price tag made a lot of decent art very affordable but there were far too many instances where pricier art was reduced to well under that maximum to fit that structure and remain competitive. It is distressing to know that so many artists had little option but to have a fire sale when the normal economy collapsed.

Continuing to depress our art prices now that we strive to head towards some semblance of new normality seems like we are opting into a continuation of the old ways. We all need to be clear that it is not acceptable to allow that to be the case. We need to think carefully about making our work valued and valuable. After all, my point of view is that there is little better for boosting creativity than the ability to buy new materials, canvases, frames, books, gallery tickets. To be able to experiment. To be able to use our income to explore and expand. It boggles me when you see artwork priced so cheaply that it can’t even cover the materials used. But this is not uncommon!

Yes, continue to open up some work to as ‘affordable’ a price bracket as possible but be wary of dropping the prices of work that we wouldn’t ordinarily discount. As ever; looking at what goes on around you and keeping up with the Joneses will only end up in distress and regret. Keeping faith in your best work goes hand in hand with demanding the price point that you believe it is worth.

Seaford studies

At the start of August I was lucky enough to spend the morning strolling around the cliffs above Seaford in East Sussex. The vivid turquoise Channel and the the warm sun pushed me towards creating a series of palette knife paintings, in oil, of Cuckmere Haven, Hope Gap, and the surrounding scenery.

These are all visible on my Instagram page and they are for sale but I will have them framed by next week. After that they will be available in my shop.

I enjoy palette knife painting a lot. The experimentation, the accidents, the textures - all make the whole process exciting. I plan to create a lot more but these few were a great excuse to get started.

‘Cuckmere Haven’, 2020, oil on paper, 8x10 inches

July 2020 - Hastings Open | 'Compaction, Romney Marsh'

July 2020:

Welcome to my digest of the main events in my practice during July!

The past fortnight has been mentally difficult as I try to navigate a work-work-life balance between coming out of furlough to my part-time stonemasonry role, my artwork, and my whole life. Creatively it has been a bit of a nightmare with plenty of new ideas but a distinct lack of funds, time, and decision-making to enact them. All the same these monthly updates do serve to remind me that great things are still going on.

Hastings Open 2020

I have had ‘Let go’, my drawing from last year, accepted to the Hastings Museum Open Exhibition. This piece has had quite a summer having been published in the Dark Mountain Project spring 2020 issue as well. The exhibition will be opening at Hastings Museum in East Sussex on 27th August and it will be on show until the start of 2021, which is a fantastic period of time it will enjoy in public. There were 1500 applications to this exhibition so to be selected as one of 77 artists is a real honour and I have already spied a lot of beautiful work from other artists who will be exhibiting as well. In this virulent times there will be no opening event, and who knows who will be able to go and see the exhibition in real life, but the saving grace is the long period it will be open for.

Compaction, Romney Marsh

A new oil painting came to fruition today, the result of several weeks of slathering a lot of paint onto canvas.

Based on a real scene in a field on Guldeford Level this heavily impasto work utilises oil paint like mud or clay. I carved this painting into existence rather than painting it.

Over a litre of Titanium White oil paint was dried on newspaper and then applied to the canvas in layers. Later layers were mixed with marble dust to provide texture. Charcoal and plant detritus were used to finish the scene and more marble dust was applied at the end to complete the effect.

The green band of water glowed in real life. The run off from the freshly ploughed field collected in the compacted tyre track and settled on top of the water like oil. The overcast sky made the landscape dreary but it accentuated the green-blue of the water.

This piece meditates upon the farmed landscape as an abused one. Pummelled and worked to death. Needing new fertiliser brought in to ensure new crops will sprout. It works, of course, but the impact of hundreds of acres of churned soil must surely be ruinous for biodiversity and for the climate when a natural carbon sink is stirred and allowed to vent. There is a better way but a century of industrial farming practise is hard to change.

For more images see here.

The Romney Marsh Project goes live

Today I have posted the first images from The Romney Marsh Project. They can be found here. As the main page currently says:

The Romney Marsh Project is an ongoing exploration of 100 square miles of coastal marshland in East Sussex and Kent. It encompasses a multitude of disciplines including but not limited to paintings, photography, drawings, film footage, audio recordings, and dioramas.

Technically the area of Romney Marsh is sub-divided into Romney Marsh, Denge Marsh, and Walland Marsh, the Rother Levels, and disputed smaller areas. The project focuses primarily on the Walland Marsh. After moving to nearby Rye in 2016 I became beguiled by the bleak yet green industrial landscape stretching from the town’s citadel to the nuclear power station at Dungeness. Walland Marsh was reclaimed from the English Channel several hundred years ago and became a working landscape largely devoid of human occupation. In many ways it is a man-made landscape despite owing its origins to a huge storm in the 13th Century, which let to the lagoon becoming land. Drains, known as ‘sewers’ criss-cross the landscape and pylons bisect everything. A few arterial roads stream between settlements, and the railway makes a rough mark of the old coastline, but the landscape is otherwise handed over to sheep and rapeseed.

The artworks in this project reflect individual facets of my exploration but they also reflect wider social and environmental themes.

There are further completed artworks in this project already but time is needed for better photography and display. Until then the Instagram hashtag #theromneymarshproject should highlight several additional pieces.

Hastings Museum Digital Quilt

This week I completed a small piece of work for the Hastings Museum Digital Quilt, part of their Hastings Digital Museum project. Let by artists Kate Hulme and Carissa Tanton the quilt asks for submissions from anyone willing to contribute to a reconstruction of Edward Badham’s ‘Corner House and the Blue Saloon’. An image of the original artwork was cut into 190 squares and, on request, handed out in order. More information can be found here. My image was number 130. The guide artwork looked like this:

Needless to say I cheated, looked up the original image, and tried to experiment with a different drawing style evolving from my usual work. The mural feel of the new quilt pushed me towards ideas of large early twentieth century Socialist murals. Solid bodies, strong facial features. Here is my contribution to the quilt:

Jellied Eels, 2020, ink and watercolour, 10x10cm on 14x14cm paper.