Slide 8 x 8″ Print by Cassia Beck

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Scrap Bag Festival Bunting by Flaming Nora

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The Circus Is In Town – Mini Print by Blackoutwell

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Carousel Rose by Maria Allen

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Bandstand by Lynsey Hunter

I wasn’t too sure about the Tate Modern when it first opened. I think that was because I was still very much in love with the Pompidou in Paris, which is still my favourite museum. So on my first visit to the new Tate Modern, shortly after it opened, all I did was compare it to the Pompidou and complain about the room of poo (still not a fan). But over the years it’s slowly grown on me and now I love it. As well as the museum collection itself (apart from the poo), I love the building and I love the bookshop which in a dream world I would transplant to my house. But I guess having it easily accessible along the South Bank is just as good. I normally spend all my time in there looking at the books, but when we went yesterday (to see the Cy Twombly exhibit – separate post later) I wandered over to the card section. And I think, as well as having the best book collection, they might also have the best cards. Here’s just a couple of the companies they stock (more on the others later)…

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we are family design

quirky & eco-friendly too, they’re all printed in Britain with vegetable based inks on FSC, chlorine free paper. who knew you could make a nice pattern out of sprouts?!

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rose hip cards

the notebooks are on recycled paper but not sure about the cards. these weren’t the designs they had at the tate but they’re lovely all the same

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Katarina F Jones

I’m not very good at talking to people at these things, but I had a quick word with Katarina about her work. It’s really eyecatching. Each print shows a captured world with something almost glowing. The light she’s managed to create in the prints is incredible. It’s as if there is a torch being shone through them. She told me that some people find them spooky, but I didn’t at all, they felt very safe – like sitting within the glow of a campfire.

see more – www.katherine-jones.co.uk

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Staffan Gnosspelius

Alot of the prints that Staffan was showing at the fair were of foxes and rabbits in very storybook settings. They really reminded me of Brer Rabbit,one of my favourite storybook characters when I was a child, and I really expected the artist to be a wise old man with twinkly eyes. But no Staffan appeared to be a twentysomething Swedish young man, although I’m sure he probably had alot of wisdom and a bit of a twinkle had I been brave enough to talk to him. He must have had about 30 or 40 prints up and each one managed to capture an entire narrative in what was sometimes only a few lines and strokes. My favourite was of a solitary rabbit looking off into the distance. I couldn’t find a good image of that to put here but you can see it on his website (address below).

see more – www.gnosspelius.com or artswitch.com

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David Pepper

I couldn’t find David Pepper on t’ inter-telly, but here’s a tiny thumbnail that doesn’t do any justice at all to his actual work. I found it on the Streatham Artists website which makes him a local and it looks like they’re having an open house in September so will be well worth a visit just to see his works again. To steal their description:

“David creates these liquid like images using multi-layers of paint and varnish on a traditional gesso ground. These dream like paintings play on an ideal of beauty, creating a new vision as seen by the artist.”

He had about 6 or 8 of these panels in a row and each one had the most beautiful blue ‘blobs’ on them which he had created from paint and what looked like oil. It wasn’t just that he’d managed to make all of them my absolutely favourite shade of blue but there was something very delicate and organic about them.

find out more – Streatham Artists

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Emiko Aida

I absolutely loved every single one of Emiko’s prints. The colours and the detailed line drawings were beautiful. To quote from her website which says it all:

Her works are the visual equivalent of the Haiku, the Japanese 17 syllable verse. She invites the viewer to use their imagination and engage with her imagery: dew, raindrops, rainstorms and rain-drenched flowers.

see more – www.aidastudios.com

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Lene Bladbjerg

Lene’s work was quite striking and I wasn’t surprised to read on her website that she studied graphic design. Her paintings and prints have a really pleasing order and composition to them. She does a lot of work with handlettering which is something I really love. She also managed to create beautiful compositions from razor blades!

see more – www.lenebladbjerg.com

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Martin Grover

The colours of Martin Grover’s work first caught my eye and then you get drawn into the detail and reading the little anecdotes and messages everywhere. To quote his website:

His screenprints offer little paeans to iconic traffic signs, bus stops, buses, and to destinations or states of mind reached and those elusive ones so often glimpsed or imagined but always tantilisingly just out of reach.

His paintings of record sleeves are brilliant also for their colour and lovely type.

see more – www.martingrover.com

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Well I didn’t really do any of them much justice but this would end up being a coffee table book if I went on any more so please have a look at more of their work on the links above and also a full list of the exhibitors at the Urban Art Fair on their website:

Urban Art Fair – www.urbanart.co.uk

Ever since I started working freelance about a year and a half ago, I’ve been having an extended “you know, I think I used to be quite creative and artistic” moment. So I’ve gone on a long-term journey to rediscover my long hidden drawing and creating abilities.

My first step on this relearning process was a three evening course at CityLit called “Drawing for Textiles”. I had no idea what to expect but was incredibly excited to walk into a room full of easels and sticks and paint and to meet my tutor, Charlotte Hardy. The three evenings were not nearly enough, but I came away with a new lease on life and remembering all the reasons I did an art degree years ago. And it was so nice to have paint encrusted under my fingernails rather than computer lint. And a wonderful feeling of  “I can make anything I want, anything!”

I’ve taken longer printmaking and drawing courses at CityLit since then – and they were both brilliant, but last week I did another 4 evening textiles course. I walked in on the first night and was really thrilled to see that there had been a change in tutors and I was back with Charlotte again.

Charlotte is an absolutely brilliant teacher, she has a way of encouraging you with your strengths without making you feel badly about the things you’re not so good at. But she’s not just a teacher she’s also an talented professional artist. Having met with her a few times now I can really see her lighthearted, honest personality in her designs.

There’s something really lovely about the way she takes everyday things and gives them a presence so you feel like you’re looking at your granny’s favourite things and all the memories that go along with them. I’m off to see Charlotte at the Urban Art Fair in Brixton. It will be really nice to see some of her work in person although unfortunately I can’t afford to buy anything today.

I think I’ll definitely be taking Charlotte’s drawing class again this year

see more of Charlotte’s work here – www.charlottehardy.co.uk

find out more about CityLit here – www.citylit.ac.uk

for more on the Urban Art Fair – www.urbanart.co.uk

So I thought I’d write a little bit about Angie Lewin who I’m thinking is probably pretty well known but she was the first surface designer whose work I could actually recognise. So I’d feel quite smug pointing out her cards and notebooks in a shop, knowing full well in the back of my head that it was probably a bit like pointing out a Picasso or Warhol – pretty obvious really. But there you go, I’m learning and Angie has a definite distinct style that is very easily recognisable even if you are a bit of a novice.

Angie studied at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. She works in a range of printmaking techniques including lithography, silkscreen and etching and more recently lino and woodcut and wood engraving. Her designs are mostly botanical and they have a retro feel to them which I think comes from the areas of flat colour. The colours she uses are really beautiful, muted and saturated blues, pinks, yellows and greens.

We’ve got some really lovely card shops on our local high street (Oliver Bonas and Zeitgeist) where I’m pretty sure I had seen Angie’s cards, but it wasn’t until Jeff bought me a couple of her notebooks for Christmas (which I can’t bring myself to use) that I actually knew her name. Since then I’ve found quite a few excuses to buy boxes of her notecards – much cheaper than buying separate cards every time, right?! Next step is obviously prints and textiles, but how to choose…

see more by Angie here – www.angielewin.co.uk

have a look at Oliver Bonas here – www.oliverbonas.com

My favourite ranges are The Good Life:

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PushMePullYou:

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Suki:

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and the Melvyn Evans address books and notebooks:

see & buy more lovely stuff from 1973 here – www.nineteenseventythree.com