The other day I had 2 hours to kill in beautiful Aberlady, on the East Lothian coast, while my daughter was in her ballet class. I went for a walk in the sunshine and popped into the lovely headquarters of the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club, which promised a wildlife art exhibition. I was delighted to discover that the artist, Carry Akroyd, is a wonderful printmaker. I was in heaven – I’m not normally a huge fan of screenprints but her work portraying nature and its relationship with man is so full of colour, movement, life and detail… fantastic. Her lino cuts, monoprints, lithographs and collages were great too, but it was really the screenprints/serigraphs that I liked best. I will definitely try to take inspiration from her work, and in particularly her compositions of landscapes. I couldn’t stretch to buying any prints, but bought a couple of postcards to take home.
On my way out I glanced through the books for sale and pounced on another delight which I couldn’t resist buying – a beautiful book by printmaker Robert Gillmore called “Cutting away“. He’s a fabulous lino cut artist and I already have a few of his postcards on my wall so I was thrilled to find this book. It’s beautifully written too and gives some great insight into the techniques he uses, something I’ll definitely be refering to for inspiration and method when I get back to lino cutting in the next part of the course.
After a lovely walk in the woods I still had time to sit in the sun in Aberlady church yard and do some sketching before going to see my 4-year old’s little ballet show. Perfect afternoon.
