Spring '26 catch-up

A gel plate experiment from last year

Almost half way through the year already! Doesn't seem possible, but here we are. The Society of Staffordshire Artists' Christmas exhibition in Leek went very well, and I'm very happy to say that not only did a framed 'Restoration' (the green and black bottle oven below) sell, but when I posted about it another was sold quite soon after by a customer who saw the post on Instagram, which was lovely. There are now only three of this very limited edition remaining. January

saw one or two sales too from my Folksy store, for which I was very grateful.

I had been brewing one particular project for twenty years, and in February I finally completed it. There's a fuller story here, but it involved scaffolding-clad bottle kilns again (Minkstone pottery, the earlier version of Restoration, was my first outing with this sort of thing) which I had photographed when they were being preserved during the demolition of the old Twyfords factory in 2006. Two versions of the linocut are seen above. There are more that I'd like to do, one being Phoenix pottery's tall chimney when it was repointed a little while back, and if I can find someone willing to allow me to use their photo, the three former Acme Marls kilns in Burslem which were all scaffolded recently as a housing development was being built around them. I'm annoyed at myself for failing to get over to draw or photograph them myself.

Over the last month or so, I've had work in two exhibitions simultaneously, very briefly - I have "Supported 4" in the Brampton Open in Newcastle-under-Lyme until the beginning of June, and had a completely different type of work, a watercolour of ipomoea plants, in the short exhibition GREEN at the Great Bear Gallery, Tunstall. Both exhibit a great cross-section of local artists' work and it's inspiring to see how many great artists and creatives there are in the local area! I've also had my Price Kensington linocut accepted for the Derby Open, which runs throughout June.

This year's Thought Press Project is raising funds for Edible Rotherhithe, as ever, and the second charity this year is Centrepoint, the youth homelessness charity. The theme this year is 'Home is where the heart is". This is the third year that I've taken part, and this time I chose to use a source photograph taken back in the 1980s from our bathroom window of a view that I loved, straight across the backs of the houses behind us to the hills a few miles away.

I'm moving on now to the rest of the year's projects. I've entered "Supported 1" to the 3 Counties Open, I'll find out in the next few weeks if I've been successful this time. It's a VERY hotly contested show, and is free, meaning that there is significantly less barrier to anyone being able to enter. With it being our big local Open, not getting in is gutting, but it's important to stay objective and enjoy the show as it is always a brilliant display of local creativity.

The Society of Staffordshire Artists have a show at Spode later in the year, and I'm planning a couple of pieces for that, one A4-sized linocut and one drawing, which I'm hoping will be larger as I'm going to be working on A3 paper. The subjects will be revealed in due time… I'm also looking forward to continuing my ongoing cataloguing of the remaining bottle kilns and ovens, particularly along the Trent and Mersey Canal. There are two more of these to complete, one being the Etruria Industrial Museum's calcining kiln, and the other site being Oliver's Mill towards Middleport. I'm also hoping to complete an illustration of a chapel in the New Forest in Hampshire which has a particular importance to the family.

Plenty to be going on with in amongst our normal daily lives, and hopefully at the end of the year my work recap will bear glad tidings!