The Sapient Pig

I've moved my blog!

You can now find me at www.thesapientpig.wordpress.com

Composite image © Sharon Whyte 2009

I finally, finally, have an Etsy shop. At the moment it's just going to be somewhere to try and sell some of the things I would normally sell at the Arts Market, but I may experiment at a later date with actually trying to sell pieces from exhibitions too.

My Etsy shop

I wish I could say the new year was off to a flying start but so far all I've been doing is trying to catch up on the things I didn't manage to get done at the end of last year.  On the upside at least I know exactly what I'm doing this year, because I have six separate colour coded lists to tell me.

All of the screenprints that I've been working on are now finished (save for a couple that I might decide to re-do) and I've secured one exhibition for 2009 so far, so mainly I'm going to be concentrating on producing some supporting materials for the series, marketing and getting more exhibitions. I'm also going to be dedicating more time to writing the book. In the background I'll be thinking about beginning to research the next screenprinting project - another archive based affair, which will probably tie in with the book. I'm really happy with the way my work is going at the moment, and pleased that other people seem to like it too - in fact last week I was asked if I'd be interested in designing posters for the Tron Theatre where I'll be exhibiting my work in August, which is something I'm thoroughly delighted about!

Having the stall at the Out of the Blue Arts Market will continue, as long as Carmen is willing to continue to be my co-stall holder and entertain me that is. It's nice to have an outlet for some of the smaller projects that I do, and it gives me an excuse to keep producing the gocco prints (for as long as we can get hold of the supplies!). I'm also currently trying to get the grumpy matryoshka and the other gocco prints onto etsy but this is proving harder than I thought since it doesn't seem to want to believe that my credit card exists. Nothing is ever simple. Hence the reason I'm still trying to catch up on last year's tasks.
Grumpy matryoshka (gocco print) © Sharon Whyte 2008

Carmen & I's stall at the arts market. We both sold out of our gocco xmas cards within seconds! Well, ok, not seconds, but we did sell them all :-)

 

Poster designed by Kate at Boxart

Hand printed Gocco cards ready for the Arts Market on 6th December at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall...

One of the new screenprints, from the series that I've been working on for what seems a bit like forever now, is included in Edinburgh Printmakers Winter Exhibition. This is not it by the way! This is just the flyer for the exhibition, featuring a print by the extremely talented Xiao!

In addition to that, I'll be having a short solo exhibition at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Edinburgh...

Oh and I'll be doing the Out of the Blue Arts Market on 6th December as well... 12-7pm - lots of goodies to buy there from lots of talented people!

Joy of joys... Gocco printing with Carmen last Friday in preparation for the upcoming Out of the Blue Arts Market (details posted soon)!

This morning has been about...

The joy of a trip to the Swedish bakery with a found fiver

Tempered by walking through mud on the way back across the park

Redeemed by finding a cute table abandoned by the side of the road and taking it home!

Yesterday for the second time in the space of a few weeks I arrived at the Printmakers Workshop having made my way across town laden with A2 sketchbook and a bag heavy with art materials before realising it was a Monday (they are shut on Mondays). The fact that I've done this twice now would be extremely galling were it not for the fact that the walk back home this second time actually resulted in me having a bit of a breakthrough in the project I had gone there to work on.

Which led me to a realisation about my habits as an artist. I often get blocks of weeks where I can't get anything done on a project and usually put it down to lazyness or distraction; but the one thing that always brings me back to it is a flash of inspiration that changes something about the work. So I've now come to the conclusion that the blockage is actually brought on by knowing deep down that what I was planning on doing was wrong and that's why I can't just get on with it no matter how much I want to get it done. This tallies with what could be seen as a lack of experimentation in my work, because I tend to do a lot of my experimenting in my head.

Anyway, by the time I got home I was finally able to start working on some of the backgrounds for the screenprints. Way back in goodness knows when last year I decided to give up on the idea of the background layers having images in them, as time consuming searches had not resulted in anything I was happy using that could be consistent in style throughout the series. I made a choice, in the interest of getting the project done and dusted, to have single colour flat backgrounds, and this was where the blockage started to set in. It really wasn't the right choice as it meant the images didn't tell enough of the stories and to me it seemed there was very little about them that was really that artistic. After working through a few new ideas about how to do things in my head on the way home I believe (please let it be true) that I have found a way of doing them that I'm happy with. This first one is just an example of the general theme I'm working to now with the background layers; they won't all consist of only words.

Work in progress, creating acetates for screenprinting, image © Sharon Whyte 2008

Tonight I'm off to a private view at the Scottish Gallery for Archie Forrest, Adrian Hope and Norma Starszakowna. It's my plan to go to more of these things, since I tend to miss them more often than not, and to then blog about them.

In general I keep trying to remember to blog about more of the arts events I go to but my memory is pretty ropey these days and so usually I just have to talk about things that have happened that day. On a day like today that wouldn't be very much. I went swimming (don't think that counts as a culture unless you take the view that I was checking out some of Edinburgh's splendid Victorian public bath architecture, which of course you could).

So in the absence of anything interesting to blog about, here's a silly drawing.


'Windowseat' - Pen & ink & gouache - © Sharon Whyte 2008