Still Life Day - 11:40am

A couple of hours in and the drawing is all done, just starting to apply the darker shadow tones. I’m planning on leaving lots of this stage of the painting just as it is now, working into the stone shelf a little and refining the pear a lot more. But the background will be bare canvas as it is here and I’ll leave the drawing lines in place where possible…

Still Life Day - 9:45am

Am doing a little experiment with still life today, want to see how far I can get in a single day…9:45 now, so enough blogging on with the painting…will post though the day as things progress…or not as the case may be :)

Oxford Art Society Open Exhibition 2009

The Boscastle painting above is in the Oxford Art Society Open exhibition at the Said Business School at the moment, The exhibition continues until 31st Oct, check the website for opening times – Oxford Art Society. Susan also has a picture selected, one of her shoe paintings, so it's well worth a visit.

If you can't make it into Oxford for that show, don't forget there's a selection of my work at the Meller Merceux gallery in Witney at the moment :)

Things are getting busy...:)

In the Forest

Some more work on this lino design today, currently titled “In the Forest”. The next stage will be to transfer this onto the lino block and then start cutting, I’ve left lots of the lines too fine in this drawing, I’ll cut them thicker and then probably do a couple of test prints as I refine them. There’s also a lot of variety of shading in this drawing, particularly the background trees and I did wonder about making those a separate colour to get that depth in the final prints. But I want this to have a very oppressive feeling so I’m going to cut everything you see here as black. The figure, creatures and grass will then have a colour pass, with the background and birch trees remaining white…hope that makes sense ;)

Some work on the next lino design

Have been working on this second lino idea from Wales tonight…while enjoying the Scorpions on Spotify and a couple of glasses of wine...and cider...and scotch…very nearly a perfect evening :) Anyway, it’s starting to come together, still quite a bit to workout on the creatures (wolves/tigers, whatever they are :)) and then a general tidy up will be needed, but all in all good progress :)

Graham Rice paintings at The Meller Merceux Gallery

You can see a selection of my paintings at the Meller Merceux Gallery in Witney over the next few weeks. They have a mixture of the watercolours and oils, hopefully something for everyone :)…it’s a lovely gallery, well worth a visit :)

http://www.mellermerceux.com/

Back to Black...and Red...

Did some work on this one today...using oils now rather than acrylics...not much to say other than that...off to the pub now :)

Postcards from Prague

Am just back from a short break in Prague, took a few photos so you may see some Czech swirling landscapes or linocuts over the next couple of months ;) Only managed 3 postcards while I was there, so apologies if you didn’t get one this time around…seems like a good excuse for me to take longer holidays doesn’t it :)

Pen and wash again, but a lot more detail than the last Welsh ones. Two from the hotel garden where I was staying and one from a small café. The Café one has a bit of a Prague feel to it but the other two could be in the Med. Will aim to get much more of a Czech flavour into anything I develop from the photos and general experience later on :) Be warned there maybe a flying nun linocut on the way ;)

Finished...some...

Here’s a final print, I’ve finished about half of them today, need to wait for the second colours to dry before finishing the other half.

I’m really pleased with the way they’ve come out. I think I’ve struck a good balance between a clean print and one that allows the nature of lino to show through, so all the prints have a nice individual feel to them.

Print of second cut

Finished the second cut today and did a quick print on the yellow prints…looks promising so far…

Marking up for second cut...

Have marked up the colour block for its second cut. Will start on that now…

First print...

First print today, couldn’t mix the exact colours I played with on the computer last night but got a couple of nice variations…Yellow, which I’m not sure about, might be a bit dull now it’s dried. Flesh tone, Sage Green(ish) and a Peach colour that I really liked and went a bit mad with when I was mixing…so I now have 33 pieces of paper with some kind of background colour on…we’ll whittle those down as we progress…not really enough space in here for this many prints, far too many cats wanting to sit on things. I shall have to look for a bigger house with space for all the things I need…

Some colour ideas...

Finished the first layer of carving on the colour block tonight and then started playing around with some colour ideas on the computer…I think I’ll try and print 6 of each and hope for 18-20 good prints in total…

Cutting second block

Did some work on this tonight, marked out the areas to be reserved for ‘dark brown’ (these are outlined in black). Then marked the areas to be cut as white (these are marked in white…PLUS the swirling ripples coming from the boat)…since photographing this I’ve cut the ripples from the boat…then I started on the fish, but following a few ciders found I couldn’t focus on the lino, so thought I’d better stop cutting before I buggered it up. Drunk at the moment, so probably a good time to stop typing, but, really enjoying this one…it’s an image that means a great deal to me and I ‘think’ it’s coming together in a way that works as a piece of ‘art’ in it’s own right, which is an all too rare a combination…well, we’ll find out if that’s true when the final image appears…

2nd lino block...

I’ve made a couple of minor adjustments to the black outline block (bottom right), printed that onto paper (top left) and then quickly printed the ink from that paper onto a second lino block (bottom left), this will now become the colour block...