Buy Good Art: Rachelle W Designs

Mrs Cheoff searches the internet like a home-spun gallery curator looking for splendid things to grace our house. I am often involved at later stages of the process to add my usual, “Wow, you’ve found another creative genius!”

All that’s needed then is the pain of choosing, the niceties of adding to basket and confirming payment - and the excitement of waiting for delivery.

Rachelle Wong is our (Mrs Cheoff’s!) latest discovery. She sent a carefully packed parcel of her work. I had already decided to give this trio of vibrant vegetables a respectful but slightly dramatic setting. Plans turned into reality yesterday and you see the results of my efforts here.

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Many designs are food related and ours were always destined for the kitchen but there are also broader influences from Rachelle’s Scottish base.

I’ve obviously sparked a fire that won’t be put out until you have your own work from RachelleWDesigns. So your first destination is to Rachelle’s Etsy Shop. But you’ll find Rachelle in various social media guises.
Webpage
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

Any of those will be ideal for posting a review of your own purchases. Let Rachelle know that you got there just after us!

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Neil Gaiman exhorts us all to ‘Make Good Art’. This is just one of a series of posts in my blog where I advocate that you also buy good art. Creativity deserves to be rewarded and fed.

Buy Good Art: Rebecca Vincent

Our trip to Northumberland in early March took place under the approaching cloud of Covid-19 ‘Lockdown’. In the end it became a final fling before staying home, protecting the NHS and saving some time each day to enjoy our new artwork by Rebecca Vincent. Our trip to Alnwick included a detour to her studio in Horsley at the start and finish of that week.

Within days of choosing our piece Rebecca published ‘Variations on a theme’ on her blog. You will see ‘Land Lines’ there.

Our ‘Land Lines’ now.

Don’t just squint at my rather poor quality photograph. Start to explore ways of bringing Rebecca’s work into your own home!

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Rebecca was immediately welcoming - no-one had warned her about me! As we looked at all her prints we exchanged our reactions and listened to her explanations. Unusually, most of the work is already nicely mounted which gives you a chance to bypass the trials of imagining a piece ready for hanging. But then she produced a few of her monotypes which seduced us with their insistent uniqueness. The quality of Rebecca’s Giclée prints is wonderful and you can see the intensive hand-finish to her etchings in the video below. But our monotype is an image which has appeared once and can only reappear in a more artificial reproduction.

As in all the works, shape, form, colour and line are here. Colours are deep and rich. Pattern appears through the intervention of textured materials. As Rebecca concedes, there is serendipity and surprise at her results no matter how much experience she brings to her work. There is plenty of manipulation and interpretation of visual reality. But the references remain familiar - even if sometimes unsettlingly familiar - and never go all the way to a distancing abstraction.

We made our choice and went off to Alnwick, Barter Books, Bamburgh Castle and many other Northumbrian delights. Returning home, our second studio visit saw us collect the work which was now beautifully mounted and framed.

Things have changed dramatically since then and a visit to Rebecca’s studio is not possible for the time being. You have links to her website where the work speaks for itself. You can still order and in more relaxed times you will be able to grab the extra reward of meeting Rebecca in person. She is every bit as delightful as the art she creates.

Enjoy this video which shows Rebecca quietly making light of her great talent and application as she produces her lovely work.

Neil Gaiman exhorts us all to ‘Make Good Art’. This is just one of a series of posts in my blog where I advocate that you also buy good art. Creativity deserves to be rewarded and fed.

BUY GOOD ART

Buy Good Art: Kate Lycett

There will be more than one of these posts. The artists will appear in no particular order of merit. They and their works are special to Mrs Cheoff and me but for all sorts of different reasons. Too different to compare and rank things in any meaningful order.

If you aren’t already familiar with Neil Gaiman’s keynote address for the May 17, 2012 commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts, I have embedded it at the bottom of this page. His exhortation to “Make Good Art” (even if the cat explodes!) is the great message which started me writing here.

Do like Neil and make good art of your own. But then look at others who are so damn fine at making good art. They might just be doing it for even more than the joy of making good art and be trying to support their finances by selling their creativity at the same time.
So.
Also.
Buy Good Art.

At present - Covid-19 is upon us - those artists need our support. Their galleries and studios are closed to us and they will be relying on you finding ways to purchase from a distance.

In recent years we have been lucky enough to afford a few works which attracted us. I was going to call them indulgences but that would be undermining the very real and sustaining pleasure which each work and their artist continue to give us.

Right (in no particular order!)
Number one: Kate Lycett

Last year we finally visited Kate Lycett’s studio and the gallery which displays her work in Hebden Bridge. We had discovered her through the mixed media of her web and Facebook pages and alerts to exhibitions. We determined to see things at closer quarters and check our strong suspicion that we would like a piece by her in our home.

Mrs Cheoff was already very taken by this one. I remained to be convinced. I crumbled willingly as soon as we saw it framed, hung and lit.

That is my photograph of the picture now in place on a wall at home. The camera does lie. My photograph looks nowhere close to what I see with my eyes!

“Painted in 2018 for ‘Craggs & Fells’ - a solo exhibition at Heart Gallery, Hebden Bridge. This is part of my favourite running route, and is a regular Friday morning outing with the running girls. The house is Stones Hey Gate, from Widdop Road, heading towards Slack. I don’t ever put people in the paintings, but the two hares (which I have seen in the fields up there) are two of my lovely friends. The white hare is Gloria, the purple one is Gill.”

That was the artist’s inspiration behind ‘Friday Morning’. It is a personal experience, elements of which Kate has decided to share with us. This is a real place made magical through Kate’s ability to communicate it through her art.

The more ordinary reality can be explored with Google Maps:

Click - and run along with Kate!

We have now had the privilege of meeting Kate on more than one occasion. She is chock-full of intelligence, integrity and industry and with ‘Friday Morning’ we have taken some of that into our home. You can ‘meet’ her for a couple of minutes as she talks about some of her work here.

There is technique on display in all of Kate’s work but it takes a very quiet second place to the insistent visual delights on offer. We can now explore part of her enchanted and enchanting artistry. There is a darkness soon to be conquered by morning sunlight. Frozen crystals of human breath settle on the landscape. If you listen carefully you can hear the sound of feet as they crunch on frosted ground. The birds certainly hear it and they scatter with enough calm to form their own pattern on the scene. Hares play their part lightly - and unaware of the folkloric magic which humans bestow upon them. A cold, broad vista offers comforting arcs of shelter… Ahem. I’m doing that thing where the viewer takes over when the artist has decided to stop. But I believe artistic creation is sustained through the ways it is owned and reacted to.

The artist is sustained by the drive to make good art. But we can help that process continue if we buy their good art. In these restricted times Kate and thousands of other artists have set up the means to explore their work and purchase it from well over two metres distant. Doing that in ‘peace-time’ has already given us huge pleasure. I recommend you give it a try.

From Kate’s website:

Here is Kate Lycett’s portfolio to inspire you.

I’ll leave you with some of the details from the work we chose. Details which draw you in while deliciously distracting you at the same time.

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Oh. And, of course, here’s that promised speech from Neil Gaiman (himself)

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012 One of the best commencement speeches. A must watch for any artist and everyone who hopes to b...

Neil Gaiman exhorts us all to ‘Make Good Art’. This is just one of a series of posts in my blog where I advocate that you also buy good art. Creativity deserves to be rewarded and fed.

Make good art…

Buy good art

Gillies Jones... Glorious Contemporary Glass

There would always come a time when Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones were properly acknowledged here. After all they have provided Jan and me with so much pleasure for so many years.

On our way to Glasgow recently we made a short, deliberate detour to the Bowes Museum specifically to see some of the latest work from their studio. I urge you to try and do the same (leave Glasgow for another time if you like!) Just eight bowls are on display. But there is so much colour, texture, design and achingly honest craft that the first reaction is delight that they are there at all. Inspired by the local Teesdale landscape, it was a privilege to add our visit to the story of a casual but committed association with a partnership that has blossomed for the last twenty-plus years in its home in the heart of the North York Moors National Park.

We camped at Rosedale Abbey forty years ago. Not long married. No kids. Enough bladder control to confine things at night to no more than one trip from our tent across wet grass to the toilet block. Britain has much to offer but we have returned here very often. No wonder Kate and Stephen were tempted to put down roots a couple of decades after our first visit. The area is lovely. In their case, full of lovely inspiration.

Eventually, alerted to their studio by tourist information leaflets, we found them and saw them at first hand, embedded in one of our favourite landscapes. A few years later we made our first excited purchase, a bowl from the ‘Long Leaves’ series in Steel Blue.

In 2014 we visited the studio again, on Jan’s sixtieth birthday. Kate was there to guide us. She eventually produced some bowls which were not on shelf display and describing one as ‘Pigeon Blue’ its choice was pretty much assured. One of our sons was setting up in business with a miniature figure range which included reference to Nikola Tesla and his rather intriguing relationship with pigeons! So, we had our second bowl, an ‘Opaque’ this time. Kate had brought out other pieces as we browsed and without much debate we impulsively added our third work, ‘Still Pool’.

Having signed up to the newsletter, in November of that year we were alerted to one of Gillies Jones' early 'Limited Edition' bowls. The Peony Bowl was in our home for that Christmas.

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No further purchases as yet but we are regularly and sorely tempted. We see the studio's work as it travels to other parts of Britain for temporary exhibition. I remember speeding as calmly as I could to the reception desk at Blackwell The Arts & Crafts House to let them know that a Gillies Jones bowl was within a whisker of crashing from its plinth! 

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Temporary contemporary juxtaposed with permanent posers... complementing each other nicely

The Bowes Museum exhibition is now in its last two weeks. My pictures cannot do justice to the works on display. If you miss them at Barnard Castle some will appear elsewhere over time. Others have been made. Three of them are on their way to Blowing Hot and Cold in London. Look out for more opportunities by signing up to the Gillies Jones newsletter. And please take advantage of at least one of those opportunities. You can then see that this work has the same strong impact as standing in the landscape itself.

I vaguely remember seeing earlier ‘Landscape’ bowls at the Rosedale studio. Perhaps I didn’t give them enough attention, knowing they were out of our pocket. But I do remember a more graphic, stripped down abstraction in those early forays seeking to express physical and human geography in glass.

The latest work is informed by digital satellite imaging but technology is gently interrupted and questioned by the artist's eye and mind. This creates a synthesis which is revealed in different ways as you move around each work. The mastery of blown glass is there still but the scalpel-like precision of engraving is now even more in tune with the curve and sinew of the material. And the changing features of a landscape influenced by light and seasons twist and swirl through each bowl. We were seduced and stayed longer than planned.

Heading on to our Glasgow destination we left those delightfully accomplished bowls behind us. But we continued to be cradled in their real inspiration until we exhausted its southern limits along the A66.