A Few Public House Books Still Available

If you weren't able to make it to the exhibition, but were interested in the Public House book, or in any of the individual prints, you can contact the Printmakers with your enquiry at:
pprints.f@ukonline.co.uk

Done (though probably not quite dusted)

The Public House exhibition closed last night, and we're really pleased with the way it all went. We've sold prints of pubs, prints of other things, and a healthy number of the book's limited run - we might even cover costs if the wind stays with us! For the Printmakers taking turns to invigilate at the show, it's good to talk to visitors about the prints and techniques and to get their views of the work. In fact it's a pleasure, when most of the feedback is so positive. One encouraging observation: most who came spent quite a while looking at all the prints - there were very few visitors of the head-around-the-door-oh-no-not-my-sort-of-thing variety.

So, there's much to discuss when the group reassembles in October - what will be the focus for the next exhibition, will we publish a Public House calendar . . . . .?

Don't forget: the Paddock Art Studios exhibition for Lewes Artwave runs from Monday 10th to Saturday 15th September, displaying work by Paddock students and tutors.
www.paddockartstudios.co.uk

Some Pages From The Book

Above are some pages from the limited edition Public House book. The book is beautifully handbound, and measures 10x13 inches. All of the original prints in the book are in the exhibition at the Hibbert Room in Lewes (details below), and they vary in size from 6x8 inches to 20x9 inches.

More About The Book

Here's an extract from the introduction to the Public House book:

This book features images of Lewes’s pubs, each one originally a handmade print by one of the Paddock Printmakers. The group meet at the Paddock Studios in Lewes, with tutor Carolyn Trant, to work and experiment with wood and lino cuts, wood engravings, collagraphs, monoprints, acetate engravings, and many variations and combinations of those techniques. The prints were produced during 2007.

This book is published in a limited run of fifty-four.

Public House is the third book produced by the group, celebrating local distinctiveness. The first two, produced in 2004 and 2005, showed prints of shops in the High Street, and Cliffe High Street. Already many of these premises have changed hands or use, so these books are documents about how things looked in a particular year.

Pubs change more slowly but we have included details of some now gone to show how the town has evolved, a subject of ever-increasing interest as the volume of building development continues to grow.

The text for this book draws on previous local history works. We are indebted to Bill Young and Bob Cairns’ Lewes Then and Now, Colin Brent’s Guide to the Town of Lewes, conversations with local historian John Bleach, and particularly Leslie Davey’s study The Inns of Lewes - past and present, revised in 2003 by Andrew Whitnall. You are encouraged to seek out this fascinating guide, republished by the Friends of Lewes and available from local outlets.

Text by Paddock Printmakers.
Hand-bound by Rachel Ward-Sale at Bookbinders of Lewes.
Layout design and print coordination by Peter Flanagan.

To purchase individual original prints and for other enquiries, email pprints.f@ukonline.co.uk

Under Way

Friday went by in a blur, hanging the exhibition during the day, then the private view in the evening. Our neighbour exhibitors, next door in the Westgate Chapel, are welcoming and friendly, and joined us in an extended game of Hunt The Fusebox when an attempt to change one lightbulb resulted in most of the lights in the building going out! Later in the day, the picture hanging team also managed to get themselves locked in, holding a key which only works from outside . . .

The PV was a great success - lots of people came, many compliments were paid, and sales of the individual prints and the Public House book got off to a steady start. The Printmakers' public clearly are a discerning bunch!

Above are a few quick snaps taken just before opening.

Twenty One Pubs - Twenty One?

Well, ok, there are twenty, but the twentyfirst was once a pub and is still a jolly nice place for a quiet drink and a chat. Each of the twenty one is lovingly reproduced in colour and line in our Public House book. When you look through, you'll see we've also added a few interesting details about each inn and those that were once nearby, so you can enjoy the prints and at the same time arm yourself with some facts with which to wow the regulars down at the Whippet and Duck. Here's the full list of pubs featured in the exhibition and book:

The Kings Head
The Lewes Arms
The Swan
The Elephant & Castle
The Meridian
The Crown
The Black Horse
The Tally Ho
The Pelham Arms
The Royal Oak
Shelleys
The Lansdown
The Brewers Arms
The Volunteer
The White Hart
The John Harvey Tavern
The Rainbow
The Snowdrop
The Lamb
The Gardener's Arms
The Dorset

Public House - The Book

We've produced books of previous shows, High Street and Cliffe - see the 'Previous Books' entry below. Those were concertina books, 14 feet long, and each edition took around 1,300 hand creases. Every single crease had to be accurate to less than a millimetre, to prevent the whole book from adopting a very unattractive drunken skew. So this year our wrists cried "Enough!" We are having Public House handbound as a conventional book, by Rachel Ward-Sale at Bookbinders of Lewes.

The book is again a limited edition, this time of 54. As of this morning (Monday 20th) Rachel has completed sewing the inner page sets, and was about to start constructing and embossing the covers.

Public House features prints of each of the twenty pubs in Lewes, as well as some of the pub signs. Using the conventional book format has allowed us to feature many of the prints at actual or closer-to-actual size - the page size is a chunky 250 by 330mm. The book will be on sale at the exhibition, and advance orders are already being taken. If you're interested, email pprints.f@ukonline.co.uk

Five Days To Go, Ducks In A Row (well, almost)

The exhibition opens this Saturday - Friday will be taken up with hanging, arranging and, in the evening, the Private View. Measuring up this morning, everyone at the Westgate Chapel is very welcoming, and the room has not shrunk since we last saw it.

The Printmakers have all signed up for invigilation - looking after the exhibition for a morning or an afternoon during its run. The organised folk have their prints and frames and cards arranged neatly in boxes by the front door, ready to be taken to the Hibbert Room on Friday morning. The rest of us are looking for frames, looking for tape, looking for paper, and trying to recollect life before the house took over from the occupants. Some are still working on prints, but let's not go there!

The book is also on schedule - more in another post.

If you have six minutes, and a general interest in marks on paper, take a look at this Short Letterpress Documentary

Who's Taking Part?

These are the Paddock Printmakers taking part in
this year's Public House exhibition:

Caroline Chappel
Barbara Childs
Nina Cornwall
Clare Dales
Judith Donington
John Filmer
June Flanagan
Peter Flanagan
Sasha Howard
Judith Kazantzis
Mary Lowerson
Charlotte Matthews
Betty Miles
Philip Miles
Susan Skinner
Carolyn Trant
Brian White
Simon Wood

It's 2007 - We're Off To The Pub!

Public House is Paddock Printmakers' 2007 exhibition, part of Lewes's annual Artwave festival. It takes place from Saturday 25th August to Sunday 2nd September, and this year we have a new venue, directly on Lewes High Street: the Hibbert Room is part of the beautiful Westgate Chapel building, in the 'bottleneck', just two minutes west of the Castle.

The exhibition will feature original prints of Lewes's twenty town pubs, as well as other work by more than a dozen members of the Printmakers group. It will also mark the launch of the group's third book of prints, also titled 'Public House'. The book follows 2004's 'High Street' and 2005's 'High Street Too', both very successful, limited-edition publications.

More information on the artists and their work, opening times etc. will be posted here as it becomes available.

Local Diversity

Carolyn Trant writes about local diversity, and the relevance of Paddock Printmakers' High Street, Cliffe and Public House projects:

I was walking down the High Street last week and met up with one of my Paddock Printmakers ( one of my printmaking class) and he dragged me to look at some wonderful reproductions of Edward Bawden linocuts that were framed up in Kings Framers framing shop window, of railway stations, a livestock market ( as we once had in Lewes), and what looked like it could have been Borough Market in London. While we were gazing and talking, two more friends turned up with Sue Clifford and Angela King, the founders of Common Ground, on a visit from Dorset, and it turned into quite a party.
Common Ground is an innovative charity which celebrates ..’ the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive’. I first became aware of them when I came across their first book ‘Second Nature’ published around 1982; I then met up with them while I was working on ‘Rituals and Relics’ in 1990 when they had premises next to the Ecology Centre in Shelton Street Covent Garden.

It was good to catch up with what they are doing and I rushed off afterwards to buy their recent book, the result of 20 years labours, called’ England in Particular’. See more details of this below.

In return I told them about the projects we had been doing as Paddock Printmakers. About four years ago I suggested to my class that working on group projects often helped if people were at a loss for inspiration and asked them to consider making images of Lewes High Street shops that we could make into a concertina book.
‘High Street’ by Eric Ravilious’ , with text by James Richards – one time husband of Peggy Angus – was of course an inspiration.

We exhibited the resulting prints – wood and lino cuts and collagraphs – in the Lewes Arts Festival - ArtWave and Peter Flanagan, a graphic designer, helped us make it into a digital concertina book, 14’ long when fully extended with around 22 images of shops. As luck ( or intuition ) would have it, this coincided almost to the day, with much promotion in the national press, of a report highlighting the loss of independent shops and bland uniformity of an increasing number of towns and their High Streets. Lewes was actually named as an example where chain-stores had not taken a hold and diversity still held sway.
The exhibition was resounding success and our limited edition book sold out in 2 days.

The following year we produced an extension of the idea documenting Cliffe High Street as a companion volume; at the same time we reproduced some of the previous images as a calendar for 2005; we then made a Cliffe calendar for 2006.
Since then some of the shops have changed hands and out of all recognition already, so it is an interesting piece of history we have produced; we should repeat the process every few years I suppose. 3 of the original prints were bought and donated to be hung in the new Lewes Library.

This year, 2007, we had already decided to focus on pubs, when surprise, surprise, Lewes again made national ( and International ) headlines by resisting the efforts of Greene King to stop serving the local Harveys beer in the Lewes Arms pub; ( try googling lewesarms or John May's blog )

Back to ‘England in Particular’ – I quote from the flyleaf….
‘…diversity is under siege. Mass production, increased mobility and the forceful promotion of corporate identity have brought with them standardised shop fronts, farm buildings, factories, forests and front doors, while intensive farming has created a bland empty countryside.
This book is a counterblast against loss and uniformity, and a celebration of just some of the distinctive details that cumulatively make England…..things need not be conventionally picturesque, rare or spectacular to be special – there is value and local meaning to be found in cakes, cliffs, cooling towers and cuckoos.’
(Peggy Angus would really love all this…….)

‘England in Particular offers a way of looking that makes the mundane magical. It will change the way you see the world.’

Common Ground
England In Particular
The Corrugated Iron Club
Peggy Angus at Incline Press

The Previous Books

Paddock Printmakers have published two concertina-fold books, 'High Street' and 'Cliffe.' The books, each around 14ft long when fully extended, feature reproductions of handmade prints from the group's last two exhibitions. They portray buildings on and around Lewes's historic High Street and Cliffe areas, using a variety of printmaking techniques. Both books were produced in a limited edition of fifty, and a few copies of 'Cliffe' are still available. The group have also published calendars which feature prints from both books.

Pictured above are the High Street and Cliffe books, considerable smaller than actual size!

Previous Exhibitions

Paddock Printmakers have held exhibitions of their work, during the Lewes Artwave festival and at other times, for several years. In 2006 the venue was Lewes House, where the group's general exhibition was well-received and successful.

In December 2005, the Printmakers held a Christmas show, Press Gang, at Thebes Gallery, Lewes. Above is the poster.

And here are a few photos from the Thebes show: