I’m a big advocate for DIY, low-tech and home printmaking, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.  I’m enjoying mixing home and studio practice- not least because of all the lovely people I get to meet at my local open print studio. Most of my printmaking practice, since graduating in 2001, involved…

Poetry has always been part of my life- I vividly remember holding my breath when I read or heard certain poems, they often move me more than visual art. But this year I want to intentionally make it a regular part of my life. For me it’s one of the most emotive arts.  I’m…

Having just finished Olivia Laing’s excellent ‘A Garden Against Time’ (last month’s recommended book) and in the next breath, so to speak, visited the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery, my mind is full of gardens and Edens and paradise, but also what gardens might mean to artists and gardens AS art. ‘A…

Resolutions, intentions, dreams, plans, goals, habits. We aim for change each New Year, set ourselves straight again, brush off the dust from last year. This year it will be better. I will be better. I’m not so sure about that. To want to be better implies that you’re starting from a point of not…

I recently visited the Paula Rego and Goya exhibition at the Holbourne Museum in Bath. It was nightmarish. Not just scary, but surreal, both artist producing dream-like, sinister images that felt like they had reached into the furthest corners of the subconcious mind to wrench out images. They were also intensely light and dark,…

What do you do when your inspiration is zero? After a bottleneck of art events recently and my usual overestimation of my capacity, I found myself burnt out and blue. I knew I needed to do something creative, but the motivation had left me. I was worn out with nothing to give. I needed…

And if it does, what makes it beautiful anyway? I did an Illustration degree 20 years ago and that time one of the worst ways you could describe art was ‘illustrative’. The same goes for the idea of merely creating ‘pretty pictures’. But can we use beauty to our own ends and what’s so…

The house I grew up in was always messy. So much so that my standard, default greeting when inviting people in was, ‘Sorry about the mess’, and one friend even called it ‘The Messy House’ (though to be fair the house he lived in was the other end of the tidy spectrum). This was…

The answer is a resounding yes- with a few adjustments. We’re fast coming upon the 6 week summer holidays in the UK, when family time and childcare will take up much more of my time. Although I love not having the pressure to do much, I also really enjoy making artwork and don’t want…

Recently, a second visit to Jim Ede’s house in Cambridge, ‘Kettle’s Yard’, got me thinking about how we live with art and it’s place in our everyday worlds. Kettle Yard is Jim’s masterpiece. A curator, collector, lecturer and author, Jim Ede knew he would never make great art. But he did know how to…