January 2020 Newsletter
Monday, 20 January 2020
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ALL OF US AT SLAUGHTERHAUS
Hi Visitor,
Double Rock I, Monotype, Michelle Avison
Here’s wishing you a year of health, happiness and brimming creativity. As we ease into 2020, some of the first courses of the year focus on Monotype, an accessible, creative way back into your printmaking year.
THE MAGIC OF MONOTYPE
Degas, Klee and Chagall are just some of the artists who enjoyed the freedom of expression that monotype printmaking affords. If you’ve never attempted to make a print before, mono-printing is a great introduction to the craft. It's good for trying out ideas, working through drawings and to explore image making, mark making and composition. Studio director Michelle Avison and City & Guilds graduate, SLAUGHTERHAUS Prize winner, Eleanor Watson will each teach classes showing how to ink a surface to print from, different ways of making marks, and the fun of printing. Our three-hour taster courses and 5 hour Sunday classes are a good place to start- we guarantee you’ll leave energised and with work to be proud of.
Saturday 25 January, 1.30- 4.30pm
Tutor: Michelle Avison
Sunday 1 March 2020, 11.00-4.00pm
Tutor: Eleanor Watson
THIS MONTH’S FEATURE ARTIST: MICHELLE AVISON
Double Pool II, Monotype, Michelle Avison
“To see a world in a grain of sand”. So wrote master printmaker, William Blake. The line may well apply to Michelle Avison’s work, or to be more appropriate, her way of working.
Each print is the result of a kind of visual stream of consciousness...a kaleidoscope of observations that transform the tangible world into something more akin to an on-going interior monologue. It may start with a drawing of a pothole (she has dozens of sketchbooks, her visual diaries, with these drawings in them) which may suggest the memory of a curve of a bay which may evolve into one aspect of an etching which may in turn trigger a slab of colour layered onto the etching through a trace of chine collé and finished with a splash of water colour. And from that “grain of sand” an entire world of observation, incident and association coalesce into the prints that are distinctively Michelle.
In her work, even that description, “print” is misleading. For her prints (no two prints resemble each other...there’s too much serendipity and experiment at play here) organically amalgamate elements of printmaking as well as those of painting, collage, drawing and whatever else the emerging work before her demands. The work leads the way, not the artist...in as much as the two can ever be separated.
Michelle has sought to bring this drive to experiment, to use the tools of printmaking in service of a vastly more holistic approach to making, not prints, but art. It is this drive that shapes the spirit and ethos of SLAUGHTERHAUS. Here you’ll find a collaborative community not just of printmakers but a band of rebels, stretching, challenging and transforming the idea of print.
So to call Michelle a printmaker may well acknowledge her vast experience in the craft (which is why her students love her teaching). But the term fails to do justice to her art which without showiness, refuses to be straitjacketed by any one discipline or technique. Call it, call her, printmaking unbound.
Michelle interviewed by Lee Johnson
A full programme of courses through to early summer is available to see on our website. We have short three hour taster classes, courses in specialist etching techniques such as Sugar Lift, then courses running alongside exhibitions such as our Colour Collagraph course in April during studio member James Anderson's exhibition of collagraphs and etchings. From April onwards we have a regular Stone Lithography course starting on Wednesday evenings- we have the stones, the press and the expertise in new tutor SooMin Leong and Matt Young, and hope to help more artists use this fantastic traditional technique. We have expanded the number of courses to include classes in the evenings and more at the weekends, and we hope you will feel inspired to take one or more of them!
For full details of all our courses see the courses page on our website.
SLAUGHTERHAUS WINTER RAFFLE WINNERS
1st Prize: Print by Michelle Avison to Caroline Rault
2nd Prize: Print by Liz Bennett to Julia Annan
3rd Prize: 3 hour Taster Class, donated back to the studio.
Thank you to everyone who took part!
With best wishes for the New Year.
Michelle and the SLAUGHTERHAUS team.
Get in Touch: info@slaughterhaus.net
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