Sunday 31 March 2013

On show *NOW*

In the L.A.B. - The 3rd showing space - Paddy Hamilton, Oliver Schofield, Robyn Banning - Photographs | Digital frames 'in movement' + Painterly wooden structures

One painting wall and printing press still operational throughout the duration of the show

"...it's meet the little artist time .." - (!)

*Making clarity details | Minimal signage as we go along..

'Pouncing' about.. On coloured Perspex blocks

To pounce

Pouncing is an art technique used for transferring an image from one surface to another. It is similar to tracing, and is useful for creating copies of a sketch outline to produce finished works. Pouncing has been a common technique for centuries, used to create copies of portraits and other works that would be finished as oil paintings, engravings, and so on. The most common method involves laying semi-transparent paper over the original image, then tracing along the lines of the image by creating pricked marks on the top sheet of paper. This pounced drawing made of pricked holes is laid over a new working surface. A powder such as chalk, graphite or pastel is forced through the holes to leave an outline on the working surface below, thus transferring the image. The powder is applied by being placed into a small bag of thin fabric such as cheesecloth, then dabbed onto the pricked holes of the pounced drawing.

*Source - Trusted Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pounce_(art)

Saturday 30 March 2013

L.A.B. | F.A.B. New addition.. Swing barrier

Allgood item

Visited Symond's Salvage yard *with an 'open mind' .. Bought this 'perfcto'
(At a reasonable price)

*Found some sunne in it - * Busy bees | Colchester etc..

Lot's of 'play' | Around it ..

Friday 29 March 2013

'Finishing off' the L.A.B. | STUDIO 3 - *Full show ON in the three studios*

Dungeness Open Studios -
Three open studios on the West-side beach. All work on show is made to a standard finish in a third studio to the right of Studio 2 and completed over time in early morning sessions in these buildings. Studio 1 is used as a 'clean space' for colouring and printing relief prints. Studio 2 hosts part-time residencies for invited visiting artists and is used as a showing space for new projects or as a viewing space for individual works seen online. L.A.B. | Studio 3 - is used as an impromptu showing space for new projects.

Generally as soon as paintings, prints or drawings are more or less completed they make their way here prior to purchase or further exhibition. We do not consider these spaces to be a 'gallery' as such, more a public extension of a continuing working practice enabling the preview of work in a clean and organised environment.

Directions by road -

www.paintings-for-sale.net/dungeness-open-studios.html

Associated blog | Crookid Stiks 'n' $TONES -

dungenessstudios.blogspot.co.uk/

Web site - www.paintings-for-sale.net

www.paintings-for-sale.net/

Thursday 28 March 2013

In betweenies..

Around banging, sawing & drilling into different kinds of tempered wood | Fiddling with digi wiring, neat LX & the general Lo Techin' around.. In the L.A.B.

I saw a wonderful dangerous creature

And this.. Dreamy... DOT | Disruptive floating on the stones moment *



Top work done yesterday - *Only the cataloguing & countin' up the CA$H to go now..

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Tuesday 26 March 2013

diggin' out


..the rabbit been busy

little big place




little tree
deep blue sky

One 'off' - A showing space | Durst Coltim

L.A.B. - One time showing space for Crookid stiks 'n' $tones

Photo (analogue) + Digi

Hanging day tomorrow

* Looking forward to it.. *

Forgot to include these | Next time..

Dungeness Flip-side | Almost darknesses


Time & stones settle, tides march in & back without the benefit of the easily given theories | certainties of the 'amateur anthropologists' _ Oblivious to the .. The people's philo$opher

Hyperbolic | Emotive - "The beach will always give you a living" - Doris Tart

Friday 22 March 2013

Anthropomorphic dalliance..

I'm just going to *Go with it... *

The longtime resisted anthropomorphic dalliance..

Might not make the wall.. For 'allgood' | sensible reasons... (!)

I've added a Quid | nugget as a foil... One result of *'steppin'* on the beach. To be seen through a.. Salty blasted keyhole shard..

That might just, clinch it.

*To step - Beach manifestation - Tidal action clears all shingle to reveal the compacted mud | shale layer - 'Over time' heavy metals such as Gold | silver make their way down through the shingle & fuse with the mud..


*Tossed out wedding rings & coins etc sit openly on the brittle mud - Ready for discovery by the Wily 'Steppahs' who know..

This top 'Local wisdom' - *Very generously shared by Mrs Moate of the much missed mighty 'Pearl' Cottage

'The Pearl | Smokery - *House fit for a fairy tale*... "No lives were lost"

Thursday 21 March 2013

Studio 2 preview now on...

Photographs | Painterly constructions and FONT compound prints
Previewing now in Studio 2
- Dungeness Open Studios

Work on show - Paddy Hamilton | Oliver Schofield

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Hercules the bird.. "No lives were lost"

Creating a third space for Crookid stiks & $tones.. In my precious L.A.B. | workshop.

I must admit to dog style tiredness.
Working on one's own, sifting through anthropomorphic tools and accoutrements, written notes & sketches, makes it not unlike leafing through a photo album, the tax year or having to move shed - Which of course it isn't .. When done | It's done & freed up again .

Hercules in a 'rough' Liston style.. 'In the garden today' - Marina | Dungeness

I had a pressing need to view Gabriel Liston's work in between the stove & the Tea..
He's usually in the back 'o' my mind (with the 'others'..)
But, quite a solace today..

I think it's confidently painted solace that he does... So extremely well

Gabriel Liston | Lastwater

*Careful now* - He bites back...

Sunday 17 March 2013

Battlefield

Facing landscape > 'studio 2' Lo | Fi

The family.... and the land + Ca$h in da Bank

The Beginning of the End by Rowena Macdonald





Clare awoke in Louisa's guest bed next to Rory. The sun was streaming through the curtains, turning the room into a box of light. Louisa's bed-linen was as crisp as new money. Against this unsullied backdrop, for once without the chaos of the children, Clare felt she and Rory could start over.
Rory was snoring like a man underwater, submerged by the alcoholic deluge of the previous evening.
“To business and pleasure,” Louisa had toasted, after Philip had poured them all the first of many glasses of wine.
“To more pleasure than business,” Rory amended.
They all chinked their glasses.
By the end of the evening Rory had been too drunk to stand. Philip helped Clare drag him upstairs, where he collapsed on the bed, hogging most of the mattress. As she squeezed in beside him, she couldn’t help overhearing the rhythmic creak of the bed in the next room and Louisa and Philip’s stifled grunts of pleasure. Thankfully, Rory was too comatose to notice.

When she returned to the bedroom after her shower, Clare found Rory had woken and disappeared. She was roughing her fingers through her hair and wondering whether she’d packed her comb when Louisa trilled “Coffee’s ready”.
“Coming.” She made her way downstairs, ducking beneath a low beam upon which hung one of Philip’s photographs of Louisa: on a beach in a silk dress, her nipples jutting like pebbles.
Rory and Philip were lounging at the kitchen table with the Saturday papers while Louisa ministered to them like a geisha, as immaculate as ever, her black hair caught up in a chignon and her zesty perfume mingling with the smell of coffee.
“It’s such a gorgeous day I thought we should go to the beach. How does that sound, Clare?”
“Sounds great.”
She placed a cup of coffee in front of Clare along with the milk jug and a bowl of sugar crystals that looked like coloured sand. All her movements had a choreographed elegance as if she was performing for an invisible camera. Clare wondered if this was a hangover from her modelling days. Five years ago Louisa had graced the covers of all the top magazines, many of them shot by Philip. Since then she had swapped the catwalk for an art gallery on Cork Street. She had invited Clare and Rory to her cottage in Norfolk as Clare was one of the artists she represented. Clare had envisaged, rightly, that her holiday home would be too much of an exquisitely tasteful domain for two boisterous little boys and had left Josh and Alfie with her parents. The weekend would be a rare adult treat for her and Rory, a chance to give each other some undivided attention.

“Amazing how she finds the time to make everything so beautiful, isn’t it?” said Clare, as they gathered together their beach stuff in the bedroom. “I suppose, the thing is, she doesn’t have kids messing everything up.”
“Mmm.” Rory pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and surveyed himself in the mirror. He was a tall, handsome man and his legs were one of his best features.
“I think, in a way, her homes are where she exercises her creativity.”
“Mmm.”

The tide was out so the sand stretched for miles beneath the huge empty sky. The sea was like a strip of torn grey paper in the far distance.
Louisa kicked off her flip-flops. “Don’t you just love the feel of sand beneath your feet?”
“Absolutely.” Rory kicked off his. “Shall we see if we can find somewhere really private further up the beach?”
The four of them walked along the dunes to a hollow where no one else could be seen.
“Sea air’s just what I need to blow the cobwebs away.” Rory stretched and pulled off his shirt. “We should have brought the cricket set.”
“Thank God we didn’t. I’m so glad you won’t be able to rope me into playing,” said Clare. She began to undress under her towel, wobbling on the hot sand as she placed one foot into her swimsuit and then the other. She wished she’d been as prescient as Louisa who was wearing her bikini under a sarong, which could be whipped off with ease.
“Excuse me. Nature calls.” Rory bounded up the dunes and stood with his back to them and his calves braced. When he returned Louisa was unpacking a hamper of delicacies. “God, Louisa, you are a bit of a domestic goddess…Clare, have you checked out this picnic?”
“Looks delicious.” Clare was smearing factor 25 onto her nose.
Louisa arranged first the food on a red and white cloth, then herself under a straw sun-hat on a pink towel with a copy of the latest Booker Prize winner.
“Don’t you want some of this, Louisa?” Rory was smacking his lips over ciabatta stuffed with Serrano ham.
“No, I’m not hungry yet.” While the others demolished the ham, the pâté, the herb-infused olives and the smoked salmon quiche, Louisa ate four cherry tomatoes and three segments from a white peach, which Philip sliced into twelve with his Swiss Army knife. Clare felt like an over-ripe Brie, creamy and burgeoning in her M&S swimsuit with its matronly stomach control panel, compared to the thin Gruyère sliver of Louisa in her cheese-wire bikini.
After lunch, she took out her watercolours and began painting the horizon. Rory fell asleep underneath the sports section of the paper and Philip wandered off. Louisa peered over Clare’s shoulder. “You’re so lucky to have your talent,” she murmured, before closing her book and lying on her front with her bikini unclasped at the back. Clare’s brushstrokes became tight with the anxiety that she might turn over at any moment. She remembered Louisa once telling her wistfully that she would “always have her art”, that it was “the only eternal thing”.
Philip returned with an armful of driftwood and began building a fire.
“Darling, have we got anything I can use as kindling?”
Louisa, who also appeared to be asleep, did not reply.
“How about the sports section?” said Clare.
“Oh yes.” Philip crept over and, as he carefully removed it from Rory’s face, Rory awoke with a snort.
“What’s going on?”
“Making a fire.”
“Oh. Good idea.” Rory sat up and rubbed his face. “Tell you what I fancy, though.”
Louisa opened one eye.
“What?” said Clare.
“A swim. Anyone else up for a dip?”
“Once I’ve got the fire going,” said Philip.
“How about you go in and tell us how cold it is,” said Clare.
Rory looked hopefully at Louisa. “Louisa? Coming?”
Louisa remained lying face down. “No. I never swim in England.”
Rory harrumphed off to look in his bag. “I’ve forgotten my trunks,” he announced, after half a minute of rummaging
“Really?” said Clare. “Shall I have a look? You know you can never find anything.”
“No, honestly, I’ve searched the whole bag. What a complete bummer.”
“How about swimming in your shorts?” said Philip.
Rory looked down at his shorts.
“Or you could even swim in your pants,” murmured Louisa, still from her prone position.
“Oh no, not his pants,” said Clare. “They’ll go all see-through.”
“You know what?” 
“What?” Clare frowned. Rory was wearing a light-bulb smile. 
“I might go skinny-dipping.”
“Oh no…Rory…please…don’t be silly.” Clare’s frown grew beseeching.
“Oh come on…there’s no one around…”
“…there’s us…” said Clare.
Rory gazed about the empty beach. “Sometimes one wants to cast everything off and be free…”
“Don’t let us stop you,” said Philip. “We’ve seen it all before, haven’t we, Lou?”
Louisa did not open her eyes so her expression was unreadable and before Clare could protest any more, Rory had whipped off his shorts and his pants and was standing in front of them, entirely naked, his penis swinging like a large squid between his thighs. He was, she had to admit, almost as fine a figure of a man as the day she married him. Ten years of their shared history were hardly written on his body, whereas she couldn’t say the same for herself: two children, good food, too much drink, not enough exercise were scrawled indelibly all over her. She and Philip watched as he charged across the sand into the waves and roared with exhilaration. Louisa fastened the back of her bikini top, turned over and sat up. “Rory’s got a lot of joie de vivre, hasn’t he?” she said.

 When he returned, dripping and panting, his penis had turned into a shrivelled prawn and he was cupping his hands over it. “Christ, my bits have shrunk completely.”

That evening, after they had half-drowned themselves in another deluge of alcohol and staggered upstairs, Clare unpacked their beach bags and hung her swimsuit on the windowsill to dry. When she unrolled Rory’s towel, a scrap of black nylon fell on the bed.
“Rory! Here are your trunks! You had them with you, after all.”
Rory, reclining against the lavender-scented pillows with his hands behind his head, simply shrugged and smiled.

Author - Rowena Macdonald

Crookid stiks and $tones welcomes the author Rowena Macdonald as a contributer | critical mind to our collective blog.

In common with us all ... After graduation, she worked as a waitress, bartender, life-model and cleaner. Her stories have appeared in anthologies published by Serpent’s Tail, Roast Books and the Do-Not Press. She has won several prizes for her short fiction, including two Asham Awards.

The critic Robert Edric said -

'Engaging, raw, inventive and, occasionally, surprising, this finely tuned and accomplished first collection confirms that, in the right hands, the short story remains as valid and as potent, as vigorous and as rewarding, as ever.'

Short Biography: Rowena Macdonald was born on the Isle of Wight in 1974, grew up in the West Midlands and studied at the Universities of Sussex and Warwick. Smoked Meat, her debut book - a collection of interlinked stories set in Montreal - was published by Flambard Press in 2011. In 2012, it was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Prize. Rowena works as a secretary at the House of Commons and teaches creative writing at Westminster University. She lives in east London and has just finished a novel with a top secret plot. 

Her attraction to Dungeness beach:

I first went to Dungeness back in the mid-nineties with my then boyfriend. It was very cold; early spring, I think. We drove from Brighton and looked at Derek Jarman's garden. We couldn't resist peering into the windows of his cottage. Thankfully, no one was inside.  In the mid-noughties, my brother moved to the Romney Marsh with his wife, and I visited Dungeness whenever I went to stay. Roundabout the same time a friend from London bought a cottage on Dungeness and began to live there half the week so I had another excuse to visit. It's very atmospheric: the eerie backdrop of the power station and the way houses, huts, caravans and boats are scattered haphazardly along the shore like objects in a Salvador Dali painting. I've swum in the sea many times and come to no harm, even though my friend told me it's dangerous; I've bought many kippers from the smokery, which I believe is now closed; and I've found many lucky stones with holes and strung them on bits of beachcombed rope. They hang in my bathroom and remind me of the seaside, which is where I was born and where I know I will end up. 

Please read this interview on the Flambard Press blog 

Links to further information on her novel Smoked Meat + purchasing details from Inpress Books * here *

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Preview *Now on* - Studio 1 Dungeness Open Studios

Crookid Stiks 'n' $TONES - Preview now on in Studio 1

Full show in three spaces from the 26th of March

*Previews are genuinely useful - Intelligent visitors have suggested changes | Detail tweaks..
I have acted upon some of them + Trip hazards have been removed.

Monday 11 March 2013

Still cheerful

$now, $tiks & $tones..
Show will be open from the 26th March - *Regardless of 'Jack's' best frosty efforts, blizzards etc..

Blizzard on | Still working

Studios quite cosy inside all in all...

Thursday 7 March 2013

In the garden today | Ex-orphan Crow

Hercules returns from time to time to remember the freely given kindnesses.. Blesses us back.

*He lived under my outside work table as a much smaller friendly bird with his own

Sunflower seeds | Bacon scraps

Black crows 'teamworkers' - *Smart garrulous birds - They set up by an 'easy grub' target - Then the relationship evolves profoundly..

Wednesday 6 March 2013

The tyranny of white | Studio 2

Littlest broom | Spachtel

Hanging day *Up date on Studio 1 .. Clear headed 'a certain' non uniformity, surprising synchronicities achieved today - *Allgood work done

*Forwards now *

Friday 1 March 2013

Showbiz | In the night

In the night

Dungeness beach as a flickering fairground..... Fleeting moments in the inky darkness.

"Lock the door and walk away, don't look back..."

A limited edition of 80 prints - Dimensions 20 X 30 cm (unframed) - *When under glass this print acts as a beautiful dark mirror*

Ctype photo print on Fugicolour professional archival paper on show in Studio 2 - Dungeness Open Studios

Signed, titled with edition number. Dispatched with full provenance - Intensely colourful 'inky dark' (the highest quality print) on a heavy acid free museum standard paper at an affordable price

[View a larger print image in a new window]

 

Price - £34.00

A larger Ctype print version *Coming soon..

The postage is free for UK dispatches.