open studios 2013

in less that 2 weeks I'll welcome visitors to my studio for Open Studios 2013.
This year is the 25th year of a project that aims to bring the visual arts into focus, providing places and spaces to view and discuss the many and varied aspects of art.
You could also combine this with a visit to the Jelly's Aunt Elsie's Spring Fling happening just outside the studio.
I'll be looking forward to meeting you at the launch at 2pm for a chat and a drink. No worries If you cannot make it on that day as I am open every weekend in May (and by appointment at other times)The studio is located on the 2nd floor in 42 Market Place, Reading RG1 2DE (opposite the cafe Picnic, the door between the hairdresser and the bag shop).

Saturday 4th, Sunday 5th
Saturday 11th, Sunday 12th
Saturday 18h, Sunday 19th
Saturday 25th, Sunday 26th
 
from 11am to 5pm

at Jelly Open Studios

many thanks to the visitors of the Studios Open Day at Jelly  last Saturday, very nice meeting you and chatting with you. Hope you enjoyed the event and the exhibited work.
The work will be still displayed at the studio so if you didn't manage to come last Saturday just let me know and I'll be more than happy to arrange ad hoc visits.
Of course in addition to act as a gallery, shoots still take place at the studio as normal, so just let me know.
Finally many thanks to Vicky Slater Photography for allowing me to exhibit her work too. Her images will be available to view at the studio until Friday this week.

 

And of course many thanks to those visitors and exhibitors at the Jelly Open Studios who were so patient and allowed me to take their photos to put together a small visual memento of the day

and here you can see the stills (click on the picture for a larger image)

Open Studio and Gallery at Jelly Open Studios Day

As some  of you know since early this year I have been using a pop-up studio in town centre of Reading in collaboration with local art charity Jelly.

The photography studio will open for the day with an exhibition showing a selection of my work and I will also have the pleasure of showing the work of talented Salisbury photographer Vicky Slater .

When:  Saturday, 6 April 2013; 11:00 until 16:00

Where: 42 Market Place, RG1 2DE Reading, Berkshire , map

I will be at the second floor welcoming you and available for a chat about all those photographic things and more. I will also have a photo studio corner and I'll invite visitors to have the photo taken as a record of the day.
There will be a variety of photographic prints for sale too and part of the proceeding will go to support Jelly for the work and activities.

photo by salvo toscano photography

photo by vicky slater photography

At Jelly  for the first time in a very long time, we are opening all the doors in our space at 42 Market Place for you to come in and see what we do in there in the Jelly studios.

The first floor will be host to the resident artists as well as The Vintage Studio, we will be serving teas too (all contributions to the tea go straight to jelly and our community work). Floor two will also include artists guests who are taking part in the forthcoming Reading Contemporary Art Fair, with a taster of the work they will be showing. Floor 3 will be a chance to see the linocut by Mark Webber, the artwork of Martin Stubbington and the other third floor residents. This is a chance to see our studios in their working state, feel free to ask questions, relax and spend some time with us. You can read more about it on the Jelly website.

For those of you using social media, here are some links to Facebook and Google+  pages of the event.

Looking forward to seeing you.

The Third Thursdays

For the past couple of months I had the honour and pleasure to be invited to participate to a new art programme in Reading, the town where I live: The Third Thursdays, another brainchild of the art organisation Jelly. 

The Third Thursday is a monthly event showcasing the creative talent of Reading and includes visual, literary, music and performing arts in non-traditional arts venues. This is another of a series of programmes and events that contribute to the enhancement of the local cultural life.

The launch event included an art auction where attendees had the opportunity to buy original works raising monies for charity.

Below is the image of my piece that was sold at the auction. Part of a Venice inspired lith prints series

the second and latest event took place last week and it was a great evening of photography, stories and poetry from Reading. I was invited to present and talk about my latest project and exhibition and I was glad it had such a positive response. People showed interest in the exhibition and asked questions about the stories behind it and the people that participated and about my photography and approach.
Particularly rewarding and chuffing was listening to the poet Anna-May Laugher from the Brickwork Poets group read 2 poems inspired by my exhibition.
You can read here a review of the event and I suggest you take a look at the Jelly website to find out more about them and the great things they do.

40 people: 40 little stories

“40 people in Reading: 40 stories of passion”
it is a photo portrait project and exhibition to explore, talk to, acknowledge and celebrate people within the community in Reading that dedicate themselves in activities motivated by a passion, a personal drive (could be volunteers, artists, activists, entrepreneurs). It is a local project, as it focuses on people that work within and with the local community and look more into what possibly is an aspect of Reading that many people do not look at or are not aware of. As we know normally Reading gets a pretty bad press (see the recent “clone Towns” survey or the notorious binge drinking culture) for me this is also a way of telling a different story and putting some faces in this story of people that break a mould. All these people have some form of connection with Reading, either through live, work, education or taking part.

The images are now an exhibition part of the Open for Art programme by Jelly, in 173 Friar Street, Reading town centre

I would like to thank the individuals and the following organisations for participating in this project:

• Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC)
• Reading Refugee Support Group (RRSG)
• Rising Sun Arts Centre
• True Food Co-op
• Jelly
• Amnesty International, Reading group
• Age UK
• Age Concern Berkshire
• Progress Theatre

nuit blanche 2010, part deux: what did we do?

we were at The Artpad - aka Jelly's home in Market Place in Reading.  We set up a special photo studio (more a corner with a very basic lighting setting) from 6 – 8.30pm. The aim was to photograph 100 visitors to the Nuit Blanche event using a medium format camera and roll film (i.e. my normal 6x6 kit and medium). We wanted to take just a quick spontaneous record of the visitors, showing them how they are and how they wanted to be as in a sort of photobooth. People were great in participating, getting into the spirit and having their photos taken.  We did not quite make the 100 but quite a few though. You can see the effort here and the related post on the Jelly's page.

exhibition

4th to 6th November 2010 at the Progress Theatre in Reading, during "Write Fest", Exhibition "Ribalta Veneziana: on the Venetian Stage" a series of darkroom lith prints inspired from the Carnival in Venice.

Below some details about lith prints (quoted from the World of Lith Printing, by Tim Rudman)

"Lith printing is a simple but ‘different’ Black & White printing technique, using ‘ordinary’ negatives, a suitable black & white paper and Lith developer – from which the process gets its name.
...... The results can be immensely diverse in different hands, according to the choice of materials and the techniques used. Lith prints possess unique characteristics and properties and these can be exploited to get different effects, so it is a flexible, adaptable and therefore very creative way of printing. It is all to do with grain size…
What drives this process and allows it to be so creative and variable is a property of lith developers known as ‘infectious development’. Put simply this means that as tones get darker they develop faster, so they get even darker, develop even faster, get darker still, and so on. This results from a chemical chain reaction and consequently development of the darker tones in the print accelerates exponentially, leaving the lighter tones lagging way behind.
The significance of this is that during development the silver grains in the paper’s emulsion grow steadily larger and in doing so, they change in appearance in a number of ways:
The fine grains of early development are generally super-warmtoned, soft and creamy in texture, grainless in appearance and low in contrast. The large grains of late development are colder in tone, coarse in texture, very grainy in appearance and high in contrast. In lith printing, this can be exploited by stopping the development when the balance of large and small grains (in shadows and highlights respectively) is as you want it – l the ‘snatch point’.
There is no right or wrong choice for this moment. It might be when the print it is predominantly fine-grained (warm, creamy, grainless, low contrast) or later in development when predominantly large-grained (cold, coarse, grainy and contrasty) – or it might be with a balance of small-grain light tones and large-grain dark tones (warm, soft and grainless highlights with cold, grainy high-contrast shadows). The choice of snatch point has a profound effect."

also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lith-Print