Author: Laura Castell

Things are now back to normal after a nice relaxing, not too busy holiday break. I hope all of you had a nice time and feel refreshed to put the energy in for an interesting and great year!

In November last year I had the very fortunate experience of being selected as one of the finalists for the Rick Amor print prize.

 

This prize is every four years since it is held every two years but it shares the prize with the Rick Amor Drawing prize, so each has a turn every two years.  The event was held at Montsalvat in Melbourne, which is a beautiful gallery. The winning work was a lithograh by Jim Pavlidis. It was indee a beautiful work, you have to see it close up to appreciate the  richness of the lithographic marks.

My work was on the topic of refugees. It is called ‘Missing the colours from home’ and it combines various relief techniques, including woodcut and lino.  An edition of 9.

This work developed slowly since I made decisions as to the background as I progressed. This is typical of me which it is sometimes a problem if I wait too long to make those decisions and then the wood or lino is cut!  In this case it worked well and I was very happy with the result. The experience left me on a high, but what I am learning is that every work I start becomes a challenge in its own right and the process doesn’t seem to get any easier. It is a lot about allowing oneself to just make art and accept with a positive view the many works that don’t quite make it but still have immense value in the subtle learning that goes on all the time.

I have been in the studio every day this week just drawing, printing, painting… the more I do the more I want to do. The last two days I have been making small collagraphs, a medium I am very interested but definitely not very practiced on it. I’ll keep working on it for a little while 🙂

I decided today to forget a little about some deadlines coming up and trying to  produce work that can be displayed to a public and sometimes that helps so much in producing something one likes. It is however not easy to separate that feeling from the actual making of art.  So today I worked with etching, and a little bit with trying to understand the aquatint process a bit more since I am really very very unfamiliar with it.  I produced this small etching of a figure and I quite like it. There is really too many unpredictable things happening in the production of this image and I am sure a next one could be completely disastrous…! That I think is what attracts me to this process so I can’t be too tight about the way I work with this medium. In any case, at least today it worked 🙂

The continuing and increasing number of people having to leave their homelands and seek refuge somewhere else is  very sad. It is in fact impossible to imagine how it feels to have to leave the home, the place, the friends, the life that you have known for a long time if not all of your life. It is hard to imagine how it feels to lack for food and water, to have to keep walking when you feel weak and sick….. oh, just imagining hurts.

Thinking about refugees has inspired some of my art. Last year I made an artist book (loose leafs enclosed in a folio) using etching as a technique. I wanted to show in some way the marks that having to become a refugee must leave and etching provided some very strong marks that did achieve what I wanted. I also made a concertina artist book using the monoprint technique

More recently I have been making small drawings. I am not sure yet what I want to do with them, usually I just want to draw and then find the inspiration in this topic and these people. When I start one of these drawings I use as a reference material from numerous sources, for example, the UNHCR, Medecins san frontiers, Amnesty International, and others. I find an image that inspires me and draw it. I don’t try to copy the image and make a portrait, both for copyright reasons but also because I want to see the image as a representation of so many more people. I just try to capture something and then let the drawing find its own way to a final result. Often the lines in the paper tell me what type of colour to use or mark to make.

The drawings are quite small. I think the size allows an intimacy that is difficult to get at a larger scale.  Initially I didn’t have a plan for these drawings, but I am thinking that I will try to make another artist book with them. We will see. In the meantime below are some of these drawings.

Two posts in a day!

For a short while now I have been enjoying the challenge of producing small works, in this case small etchings mostly of local animals. I seem to  like to push etching to the more unpredictable area, allowing ‘open bite’ and unintended plate marks to develop. This of course means that sometimes I ruin the plate!  It is quite surprising how sometimes an extra minute in the acid is too much. It is part of the journey of discovering a bit about myself as I learn how I like to make art.

Below are some photos of these etchings. I am allowing the possibility of large editions (up to 50) to make them more affordable and I am trying Etsy to see if it helps  to put the work out there. I do not show my work much so I am exploring this venue, at least for the small work. Let’s see!

Hola! Feliz Año 2015 with lots of health and happiness! Hoping deeply for a wonderful year for all, to find more peace in the world and more contentment.

I have a new website and I am still in the process of moving things over. I am not very good with computers so this turned out to be a bit (I really mean ‘much’) more difficult than I predicted. I hope the change is for the better! still have lots to learn. You will see that the previous blog posts are in fact from the previous website, I had to ‘copy and paste’ them so  to correct  the dates I included them in the title.  I also need to learn properly about inserting images. You can see that many of my images have this weird black frame around them… not intended. Some don’t but I don’t really do much differently… hopefully this will soon be solved. So in the meantime please excuse the no completely professional  look.

I hope this year I will share more of my process and inspiration. Now that I don’t have ‘another’ job I am supposed to have more time… it hasn’t happen yet  🙂 but I don’t complain, it is so great to be busy doing something one really likes. I love what I get from other artists on the web, so I hope to give a little back.

This is a small etching I created during the Christmas break. It represents the Humbug damselfish. My husband worked with this fish for many years and I always wanted to create an artwork that had a special meaning for him. Next are pitcher plants and ant plants!

The exhibition only has one more week to go and it has been a truly great experience. There is nothing like the pressure to meet a deadline to help one push the boundaries of what we know and be braver at expanding. This is what this exhibition did for me, push me to combine techniques, push me to explore more about colour (really difficult for me!) and remind me of how nice it is to work with the theme of nature. I will be forever grateful to the Perc Tucker Gallery for their belief in me and support to see this come through. I have put all the works available in the ‘ printmaking’ Portfolio.

I have since created one more work. We had a nest of a pair of  brown backed honeyeaters in our garden and two little babies were successfully reared :). On this day it was time to practice flying and both little ones had a go. It was fascinating to see, the little ones have still very undeveloped tails so they fly very clumsily. I hope to produce some work of some of those stages, but this one just shows them safe back in the next wanting to be fed.

Today is a big day…. I am going a bit later to the Perc Tucker Gallery to help mount my exhibition on ‘Birds and Other Creatures’, to be displayed in the showcase. It has been a very intense month, working hard to produce some new works, but very satisfying because I have learned a lot. The exhibition was a last minute opportunity so I only had a month to get ready.  There is nothing like pressure to push you to places that may be one wouldn’t go in the tranquility of every day. I feel I have learned much more about working small, using colours and combining woodcut and linocut to complete an image. It is quite interesting to understand better the differences between lino and wood as a relief medium and understand better what it is that attracts me so much to wood. I know I like the work but of course, as with everything, with more time would do a few things differently. I hope people like it! there is also a scary feeling when one is exposed like this to the audience…. hard to avoid that feeling.

I have been quiet for quite some time. All is good but this is now what I will call “an adjustment period’. After many years of work I have taken the decision to quit my ‘other’ job. In terms of piece of mind it feels like a great decision, time will tell whether it was also a good decision in other aspects. For now, I am trying to answer those questions that I imagine many artists have: what do I want to do as an artist? why am I making art? where do I want to take my art to? Do I want to be commercially viable or do I want to do the art that truly comes from my heart no matter if it is likely to be sold or not? I imagine the answers will come slowly so I must be patient and let them form and in the meantime keep working on my art.

This saturday is the opening of our Pressnorth Printmakers group exhibition resulting from the 4 workshops we took with Peter Lancanster, G.W.Bot, Trent Walter and Judy Watson. It is a great display of the many different techniques we learned. The second smaller print in the invitation is the lithography I made during Peter Lancaster’s workshop. Great experience, learned lots.

Last weekend I attended a 3 days workshop with Trent Walter. Trent is a master printmaker and artist based in Melbourne, with a rich history of experience working with other artists and on his own. This workshop is part of a series of 4 workshops with well known artists (Peter Lancaster, G.W.Bot, Trent Walter and Judy Watson) that are coming to Townsville for an artist residency and as part of this they give a workshop. The program has been organised by Pressnorth Printmakers, a North Queensland Printmaking Collective of which I am very proudly part of! and funded by Artslink Queensland, and done in collaboration with Umbrella Studio and Perc Tucker Gallery.
Trent’s workshop was very interesting and inspiring. I am only just learning to produce images that have more than one or two layers, and usually I have worked mostly in black and white so the workshop was just what I needed. This workshop was about using many different techniques to create an image, including image transfer, monoprint, stencil, watercolour, and more if wanted! Such a variety of techniques usually leads to the production of one unique image, that’s why the name monotype or monoprint. At the end we produced two books that will be exhibited as part of the exhibition Dexterity, which will showcase selected prints from these workshops. This small exhibition will run at the same time as two other much larger exhibitions by two printmaker friends I admire, Jo Lankester (Cornerstone) and Donna Foley (Limina: the threshold of experience).
The image below was my best and the one that appears in one of the books. It has image transfer, monoprint and several stencils. Very happy!