Last weekend, myself and Victoria (of Victoria Anne Illustrations & Design) had a stall at Banbury ArtFest. This was the inaugural event; organised by Artist, Art Shop and Gallery owner Barry Whitehouse.
The plan was to house 30+ of the areas Artists and makers demonstrating their work in one place during the Banbury & District Show, an annual event organised by Banbury Town Council, so that the public could see how the art is made. With such a warm, sunny day, you couldn’t have asked for better weather to bring out the crowds!
For our stall we decided to showcase Linocutting (me) and rubber stamp making (Victoria), with a bit of knitting thrown in! We are working on the format of our knitting event/s so stay tuned for more information on that soon.
I started the day by carving a design I had already sketched out in my sketchbook. It’s a vintage stand mixer to accompany the retro bowl and spoon print you can just about see in the background.
[Note: I’m removing a bit of lino from the tool in this pic, do not carve with your free hand near the tool, they are super sharp. Use a corner tool to keep the lino steady!]
I ended the day working on a linocut of the goats that were in the pop-up farm outside the tent. I’ve never carved animals before, perhaps it was the influence of the wonderful Melanie Charles and her animal portraits, as she was based beside us for the day!
It’s all ready to be inked now, when I have done so I will pop up a photo on my instagram.
The highlights of the day were being able to spend time surrounded by so many talented, creative people and having the opportunity to chat to them, as well as talking to the general public about what we were working on and about our course. We are so lucky to live in a community that is so richly populated by artists! It was also interesting how the main connection most people have with lino is from carving lino at school. This was something we definitely didn’t do; I was completely fresh to it as a medium about 18 months ago. My favourite responses were definitely from children; it’s really enjoyable to explain the process.
I think we learned a lot about how we’re going to market our work in the future, and how we can draw interest to our work. We’re already planning for next year!
I now have some work for sale at Church Lane Gallery. A linoprint of Church Lane and one of my retro bowl prints!