Is that art or can we sit on it?

Henry Moore; 'Draped Seated Woman' 1957-8

One of our favourite days out is to the magnificent wonderland that is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is one of those special places which lifts the spirits and cleans the soul. Covering 500 acres, there is more than enough walking to make adult legs, let alone tiny ones, rather weary - which is where the title of this post comes from. "Is that art or can we sit on it?" was asked by our then small daughter on her first visit many years ago. The subject of her query was in fact a bench - though we had to admit it was perhaps more aesthetically pleasing than a couple of the sculptures, so we could understand her confusion. (Since then the phrase has become family code to express..ahem..scepticism about artistic merit. Follow us around a museum or gallery and you might hear us muttering it under our breath to each other - most recently I'm afraid in Tate Modern. So we're philistines. What can I say?). Fortunately there are plenty of places provided around the vast spaces of the park for visitors to sit and rest and enjoy the views.

Last weekend my husband and I (along with a large part of the population of Yorkshire, as it turned out) made a special trip to see the newly installed 'Poppies: Wave', a small part of the extraordinary Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation which was at the Tower of London in 2014.

In the glorious autumn sunshine our first glimpse of the poppies in the distance was like a fiery beacon, reflected in the water below. What a fabulous setting for this stunning display.

Even on a busy day the park is so big it isn't too hard to escape the madding crowd and find some tranquility. On this visit I spent quite some time just gazing at the reflections in the Boat House which houses JocJonJosch's 'Eddy'.

JocJonJosch: 'Eddy' 2014

Another of our favourite spots is James Turrell's 'Deer Shelter Skyspace'. How can a simple* hole in a roof be so effective and mesmerising? But it is - and with the added benefit that this is simultaneously art AND you can sit on it, or at least in it.

James Turrell: 'Deer Shelter Skyspace' 2007

* I have no doubt it isn't simple at all, but very cleverly designed and engineered to achieve the effect it does.

The Poppies will be in place until 10 January 2016, but the Sculpture Park is open all year round and always worth a visit. Entrance is, astonishingly, free - though of course donations are always welcome. The icing, or perhaps gravy, on a great day out is the excellent restaurant which is very good value and serves up a delicious menu.

Pro tips: 

• Get there as early as you can, especially at the weekends. If you arrive a few minutes before the opening time of 10am you can always set off around the park and open air exhibits before coming back to the visitor centre and indoor galleries.
• Do pick up a map. You can miss entire sections of the park without one.
• Parking is by number plate recognition and you can pay at the machines at any time during your visit. Pay early in the day because the queues at the machines can get quite long later. Don't waste time trying to work out how long you will need; just pay for the whole day, you'll use it!

For more information visit www.ysp.co.uk

Sophie Ryder: 'Sitting' 2007

Abbeys - creating a new series of collagraphs

Up to now my collagraphs have tended to be small and detailed, often relying less on the structure of the plate and more on the wiping of the ink. I had an urge to do something a bit bigger and looser, and so the idea of a series of prints of landmarks was born. The first two images which popped into my head were of two of my favourite places in North Yorkshire, which both happen to be ruined abbeys. Here are the finished prints of Whitby Abbey (English Heritage) and Fountains Abbey (National Trust).

Whitby Abbey and Fountains Abbey each 30 x 30 cm

And here's a little about how they are made. The first step is to work out the drawings, thinking all the time of how the layers will need to be built up on the plates and the order in which they will be inked up. Once the drawings are finished they have to be traced onto the pieces of mountboard I'm using as plates (remembering of course to reverse the images!).

Then comes the fun bit of building the plates both by cutting away some parts and by adding collage elements. I use different textures of paper, pieces of fabric and pva glue painted on in lines and smears. It's important to remember these are printmaking plates, not collages, so some parts might be counter-intuitive. For instance look at the middle window on the Fountains Abbey tower on the right; I want to 'see' the sky through this, but instead of cutting away a section of the tower which would then just fill with the ink I use for the stonework and be dark (like the small top window), I have stuck on a piece of plain paper which I will be able to wipe clean and then add a little sky colour at the end.

Once the plate is finished it is varnished with several layers of shellac and left for a couple of days to harden completely. Inking up is a long job and has to be carefully planned (you'll notice planning is a recurring theme in printmaking). There's no point adding ink to one area if it's going to be wiped away when you add another. The photo on the left shows the Whitby Abbey plate with the ink laid on the sky, background and pond. I wipe most of this down before adding the ink to the abbey itself, and then there is a lot of wiping, touching up and more wiping. It takes about an hour to reach the stage in the photo on the right, which is the plate ready for printing.

The really magic moment is when you pass a plate through the press and see for the first time what it looks like as a print. There is always an element of surprise - simply the fact the picture is a mirror image of the plate you have been working on for so long means it looks fresh and new.

Then it's time to clean the plate down, prepare another piece of paper and start inking up all over again.....   I'm planning to get editions of 15 of each print but collagraph plates are fragile things. Look what started to happen to the Fountains Abbey plate after just three prints.

Aaaagh! This will need careful repair and then more varnishing before I can carry on.

And meanwhile I'm thinking about what will be the next prints in this series. All I can tell you for sure is that they will be abbeys or churches. They might be all in Yorkshire.... or they might not. They might all be ruins... or perhaps not. We'll have to see where inspiration strikes. Do you have any suggestions?

Seven Plums - watercolour demonstration

I recently took down the demonstration pages that had been on my website for several years. They were getting a bit stale and I'm not planning on reproducing them all here. However this was a particularly popular one and I still refer to it in my Watercolour Improvers workshop, so I thought I'd give it a new home here on the blog.

The idea of this demonstration is to show how careful planning of glazes can produce vibrant and fresh colour, even when using all three primaries layered together. The effect you get from layering in this way is completely different from mixing the same paints together on the palette.

For this study of plums I needed a range of hues including yellow, green, red and purple.  I spent some time experimenting with layering different colours and planning the order in which I would work. The chart below shows the colours I planned to use and the swatches along the bottom show the results of the different combinations.The colours would be layered starting with the yellow and working through to the violet, but not all areas would have all the layers or in the same intensity. For instance the yellow is used more lightly in the areas which will also have cobalt blue and violet to avoid the colours turning dirty green.

All paints are Winsor & Newton Artist range.

OK so that's the planning - now for the execution. The first wash is Transparent Yellow.  It is applied lightly in some areas and in others is not used at all, depending on what the eventual colour is to be. The stalks have been protected with blue tinted masking fluid.

Then Cerulean Blue is added. I add this only where I want to achieve swatches 2 and 3 on the chart.

Then Permanent Alizarin Crimson goes where I want to achieve the colour swatches 3 through to 6. Do you see how this is working?

Cadmium Red goes on next...

..then Cobalt Blue...

..and finally Winsor Violet (Dioxazine). There were just a few tiny areas that have been left unpainted until this point so they now have only pure Violet on them (the last swatch on the chart, number 8).

Here's the finished piece with shadows, lace and stalks added.  The shadows and lace holes are all painted with colours used previously (Cobalt Blue, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Transparent Yellow, Winsor Violet) but because here the paint has been mixed on the palette instead of being painted in layers on the paper, the result is muted neutrals rather than the vibrant colours of the plums

'Seven Plums' - © Jane Duke 2011

I hope you enjoyed this demo and found it useful. Do let me know what you think in the comments below.

The legal copyright bit (sorry but unfortunately this is necessary):

You are very welcome to follow this demonstration for your own pleasure, but please remember that exhibiting or selling the resulting painting without acknowledgement is copyright infringement.

The Most Happy

I love Hampton Court Palace. I mean I really love it. I love it so much I get a bit weepy just walking through the gates. Visiting from York entails a round trip of 500 miles and an overnight stop in a budget hotel, but it's worth every traffic cone and little plastic pot of UHT milk. Just being there makes me 'The most happy', the phrase Queen Anne Boleyn adopted as her motto.*

When we visited last weekend we headed straight for Henry VIII's kitchens, getting there before the crowds who had been waylaid by the signs to the Great Hall. The costumed cooks had just got the huge open fire going and were starting to spit roast a couple of large hunks of meat. The guides told us that the most common question they are asked by visitors is "Is that a real fire?", which is quite shocking and rather sad. I suppose that in a world of central heating and electric ovens, it is possible for people to go through life without ever seeing real flames and so not be sure what a wood fire looks (or sounds or smells or feels) like.

Look! Earthenware, wood, wicker, stone, herbs... so much loveliness.

Rather a blurry action shot, but I love the way it looks like a Brueghel painting.

After the kitchens we moved on 150 years to William III's apartments (also empty - "Everyone goes to the Great Hall first" said a guide, with a hint of sadness) and made an initial foray into the gardens, before we too succumbed to the lure of Tudor apartments and the Great Hall, where we encountered a team of 'Time Players' in period garb performing 'Pastime with Good Company'. The rest of the palace followed after lunch, including George I's Chocolate Kitchens (yes two rooms JUST FOR CHOCOLATE; forget a gift wrapping room, a chocolate kitchen must be the ultimate sign of a luxury home) and more time in the gardens, which now have 500 deckchairs to mark the 500th anniversary of the palace.  We availed ourselves of two for a while. (If you read my blog post about Chirk Castle you might detect a recurring pattern here.)

Why don't more gardens have fantasy beasts on striped poles? They're wonderful.

The sound track for our journey home was a Music for Feasting CD bought in the gift shop - medieval and Tudor smash hits played on period instruments (Now That's What I Call Minstrels). We head banged in the car in Wayne's World fashion and sang along in Latin.

You might have guessed by now that I am a bit of a Tudor nerd, which is one of the reasons that earlier this year I started a series of hand tinted drypoint etchings based on Tudor drawings. The first two I've completed are taken from Holbein sketches of Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. The watercolour hand painting of each print, along with the fact that the ink colour is varied for each impression, means that each print is unique (a monoprint). There will be no more than 40 prints in each edition.

Hand tinting an 'Anne Boleyn' etching with watercolour paint.

Tudor Series - drypoint etchings with watercolour tinting

Oil based ink and watercolour on 140lb watercolour paper

Image size 14 x 20.5 cm

Available in my Etsy shop

*Compare and contrast with the 'Bound to Obey and Serve' motto of her straight-laced successor, Jane Seymour. Oh Henry you silly man.

Ammonite Giveaway Winner

Thank you so much for all your entries to the giveaway I posted here at the end of July. I was delighted to see so many right answers! The challenge was to watch a short video released by Saltaire Inspired to whet your appetite for September's Makers' Fair, spot me in it and tell me which word appeared on screen at the same time as I did. (As if that wasn't easy enough, I was actually wearing the same top in the video as I am wearing in my current profile pic.)

Here I am, and the word is 'creative'. Using the latest cutting edge competition technology (printing the correct entries on bits of paper and putting them in a bowl), the winner has been selected and...

The independent adjudicator checks everything is in order.

(drum roll)....

...it's Gail Falkingham.

Congratulations Gail, your Ammonite collagraph print is on its way to you!

For everyone else who entered, sorry you didn't win this time, but this series of prints is available online and will of course be at the Saltaire Festival Makers' Fair 12-13 September.

Can you see me?

I was delighted to hear I am one of the 45 artists and makers selected for the Saltaire Festival Makers' Fair in September. The icing on the cake was finding out that I'm featured in this rather fun little video released to publicise the event (using a pic which must have been taken of me at last year's show). Can you see me? If you can then you could win one of my new Ammonites prints. Watch the video - it's only 30 seconds - then see below for how to enter. (Hint - if we haven't met and you can't see what I look like from the little profile pic here, there's a bigger version on the 'About the Artist' page of my website.)

Once you've spotted me, simply email me with the subject line 'I see you' and tell me which word is on the screen at the same time as I am. A winner will be chosen at random from all correct entries after the closing date which is 10 August 2015.

• Only one entry per person please
• The winner will be emailed and asked for their name and postal address so the print can be sent to them. If no reply is received in three days another draw will be made.
• The winner's name will be published here on the blog
• All emails will be deleted after the winner has been drawn; your email address will not be saved and will be used only to contact you if you are a winner.
• The prize will be a print from my Ammonite collagraph monoprints series. (Three different examples are shown below).

Ammonite series mini prints -  each image size 10 x 10 cm

For more information about the Saltaire Festival and the Makers' Fair please visit their website. The Makers' Fair is on 12 and 13 September 2015 in Victoria Hall, Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

The Ammonite prints will be available at the Fair and are currently in my Etsy shop. If you're near York right now you can also see them in the 'Jurassic Coast' exhibition at Blossom Street Gallery until 19 August.

Good luck!

Who is Stoneflower Stu?

I’ve used the name Stoneflower Studio for more than seventeen years and quite often I am asked where the name comes from. Equally often, it has to be said, people think I must have meant Sunflower and just call me that instead: amusing when written on an envelope, less funny when written on a cheque. On one memorable occasion, the advertising editor of a local magazine decided I had made a mistake when submitting copy and so helpfully corrected the text to read ‘Sunflower Studio’. To reassure me that it was really no bother she kindly added an image of sunflowers to the background of the ad too. I think she was quite hurt that I didn’t appreciate her efforts.

So anyway how did I start using this name? In 1997 our brand new house was being built, along with several others, on disused industrial land between existing houses.

Autumn 1997

When our neighbours’ properties had been built several decades earlier, the planners had shown a distinct lack of foresight and imagination (or indeed planning, which was their job) and failed to hold back any spare house numbers, so now we would have to be 25a, alongside 25b, 25c, 27a and 27b as well as the original 25 and 27. We anticipated trouble, mis-delivered post and unordered pizzas* so those of us watching our new houses being built decided we needed house names too. After much deliberation I had the stroke of genius which was ‘Stoneflower’. It was so right! It was so perfect! But just as we were about to order a sign and notify Royal Mail and the Fire Service, our children deployed the downcast lashes and small voices tactic and murmured that they’d always liked the name of our old house [insert heart tugging sigh here]. Instant parental deflation was piled onto the guilt already felt at uprooting our six and four year olds from their home 200 miles away and thus the old name, 'Alderley', was duly re-used. What a shame we'd left the house sign behind.

But I still haven’t explained about ‘Stoneflower’. Well it comes from the names of our children – yes that’s right, the ungrateful ones who spurned my suggestion of immortalising them in a slate plaque on the front of the house. Our son is Peter, which I’m sure you know comes from the Ancient Greek ‘Petros’ meaning stone. Our daughter is Poppy, which should not require any explanation for the flower bit. Having come up with such a wonderful, meaningful name (even if this view was not shared by the children), I didn’t want it to go to waste so decided to use it as my business name.

A watercolour I painted of the children in 1998

I have since discovered Stoneflower Studio won’t quite fit on my bank card where the embossing reads STONEFLOWER STU. I rather like the sound of Stoneflower Stu. He sounds cool. I imagine him as a banjo player supporting Seasick Steve on tour. When I joined Twitter I considered becoming StoneflowerStu but settled for @stoneflowerjane. Perhaps I should give Stoneflower Stu his own account. I wonder what he would tweet about?

*By the way we were proved right. And having house names didn’t help after all.