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.

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

masters of the darkroom

a video documentary about master silver printer Robin Bell, for sure of great inspiration for us photographers and printers.
this is the trailer
enjoy.

many thanks to the authors for producing this documentary

Edit, 2nd Sept 2011
A new trailer has been just released, also looking very good.