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.

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