Art Club Talk and Soaring Into The Blue

Last Friday night I gave a talk to an art society group about my art and printmaking. In the first half I talked about my painting process and showed some photographs. I set up the pictures in Power Point and connected to their projector. The color was a complete disaster which was a pity. It appears that they find it hard to get the color right when using the projector so in the future if I am asked to do this again for a smallish group, I will take my own monitor and use that, then I know that the colors will show correctly.

The second part of the presentation was about printmaking. I mainly make collagraph prints, a form of printmaking, which as the name suggests, comes from collage. I took a variety of my prints and also some examples of the collagraph plates that I make to print the images from. As usual everyone fell in love with the actual plates. I think it is the texture and depth of the plates after they have been printed that is so appealing. Because printmaking, and especially collagraph, is less familiar to many artists I think it was probably the most interesting part of the talk.

To brighten up this post I have added a photo of a small collagraph that I experimented with last week. I wanted to try using printing ink in a very transparent way. It's part of a larger plate that I wasn't happy with so I cropped the image down. It ended up being very simple but I think it has a very optimistic feel. Does it feel that way to you?