Old friends and a 5 day collagraph school - What's the connection?

In 1967 two seven year old girls, me and my friend Dianne met at the local convent school where we lived in Zambia. There began a friendship between our two families; our parents became surrogate aunt and uncle to each others' children; Dianne's mum worked as my Dad's book keeper; we made our first Holy Communions together, our Confirmation, we played in each others homes, had sleep overs, went on to boarding school together, first discos, first boys, etc, etc.

Then in 1976, my family left Zambia and returned to Ireland, Dianne's family moved to Botswana and then South Africa. Gradually over the years the two families lost touch.

Fast forward to 2010 and the power of the internet - Facebook to be precise. Dianne's older sister Beth contacted me and the intervening 34 years rolled back. It turns out Beth and I are both artists and Beth was particularly interested in the printmaking I am doing. Some months ago she convinced me that if I ran an extended collagraph workshop she was sure she could get a group together from Johannesburg to travel here to Northumberland for it.

So that is what we are doing. As neither of us has done this before it is taking some organising. Working out the course content was the easy part. Lining up all the other ducks in the row - dates with accommodation, flights and flight costs for a group of 10 is proving to be the most challenging part. However, I am confident we will get there ... and ... having done it once it will be easier to do again if (when) it all comes together.

The next post will be the details of the course as they stand. Whilst the course has been primarily arranged for participants coming from South Africa it does not preclude anyone else who may wish to join us.
Just contact me if you are interested.

Mandy's evening class

I had one of those Eureka moments in Mandy's evening class last night! After Mandy's quick recap demo of what I missed last week (in particular Chin Colle) she let me dip into her treasure trove Chin Colle bag of papers - accummulated over many years of collecting scraps of paper from everywhere. I began experimenting with a page from Elle Decoration of patterned table mat designs, a piece of Trompe D'Oiel wall paper, and a picture of a salad from one of the Sunday supplement magazines. I took small scraps and incorporated them into a linocut I started at the beginning of the week. I'd printed stage one of a reductive print and this was stage two having cut some more detail out of the plate. The patterned table mat designs, and the Trompe D'Oiel worked but not the salad.

As I was nearing the end of the class I decided to just test out one of the other plates which did need more cutting but the basic shape/form was there and it would do just to test an idea I had using a page from a 1960s Women's Weekly magazine on embroidery stitches. There was some spare gold ink that someone else was using so rather than try and mix something and make more mess to clear up I rolled the plate up with the gold ink, cut out a piece of the magazine of flower stitches and printed the plate over this scrap and onto the base hahnemuhle and it all came together beautifully. I was so excited. THIS is what I wanted to get my head around. It's all about chosing the right piece of scrap paper to match the subject and take it somewhere one did not necessarily envisage at the outset but which takes ones idea to a competely different level of lateral thinking.