A bit of wheeling, a little dealing, wood type and a birthday card

I’m almost at the end of a two week break from art of any kind and in fact the nearest I’ve been to any artistic endeavour or expression has been painting our two sheds and the summerhouse. It was most definitely thinking time! I did print a specially requested birthday card for one of our grandsons. He’d seen the funghi cut for the book and wanted the image as his birthday card in September but with some colour added. So a touch of colour from the Sixties was applied although they aren’t Magic Mushrooms.

Finally while rooting out and tidying off-cuts of paper in one of my plans chests I found a twenty year old poster that some of my degree students produced for me, they always politely took the mick out of me for collecting odds and sods of old wood type no matter how isolated the pieces were. So they were all odd fonts of different type and some really were orphans. I kept the poster because of the type, a little nostalgia and the memory of some great students, as a bonus it brought a smile to my face and now it’s on the door into my little studio.

Finally I swapped a couple of my prints with Graham Vasey for two of his really atmosheric photographs of derelict buildings Upper Tees Dale on the Yorkshire/County Durham Border high up in the Pennines and they’re going to be framed next week. He also sent me a copy of his self-published book on the Fishing Flies of a Teesdale Angler. What treat. Take a browse through Graham’s website, the images he produces are truly beautiful and very, very atmospheric.