Arts Show Good Friday Special – Emrys Williams, Calx Creo & Open Studios.
Arts Show Good Friday Special – Emrys Williams, Calx Creo & Open Studios
Leave a comment
Anglesey
Arts Show Good Friday Special – Emrys Williams, Calx Creo & Open Studios
Tomorrow afternoon from 2.00-4.00pm on 102.5FM and www.monfm.net I’ll be running a holiday Arts Special talk show. The Calx Creo group of artists are joining me in the studio to discuss their show which is on at Oriel Ynys Mon, and about how they came together, (http://calxcreo.co.uk). Also I’ll be featuring an in-depth interview with artist and lecturer Emrys Williams ( https://emryswilliamsblog.wordpress.com ), who talks in a fascinating way not only about his own work, but in more philosophical terms about what it is like to make paintings. Touching on Nietzsche, Proust, Courbet, Braque, Mondrian and Bachelard, Emrys shares insight into a painter’s thoughts and processes.
In addition, on the show we’ll be discussing the Anglesey Open Studios event which is going on during the Easter period for a fortnight, and artist Rachel Rosen has been visiting some of the studios to report on how its going and what you can expect to find if you’re doing this event for the first time. Together with our other guests we’ll discuss the Open Studios concept.
As for me, excited by this weeks’ invitations to exhibit this year in Italy and once again in Lithuania, there is new work underway. And here in Wales I’m open to the public on Saturday 4th April 11.00-5.00. You can share in the construction of my large new piece ‘In Residence 26’, where I am making a red cast of my house in latex, aided in this by a homeless friend. Or you can simply come and have a look. The constant rain this week has delayed the project, but I intending to continue up the roof and over the remaining windows in the next week. Peeling the item off should follow the week after…weather permitting. You can follow my progress on #inresidence26 – and why 26? because, in a life of frequent movement, its the 26th place I’ve lived in.
By the way, my new website should be completed later in April, having decided on a new look I have yet to re-design the content, having removed the previous one last month.
If you’re off for Easter, have a great break.
Eli
Portraits and Poland
On tomorrow’s Art Lounge we’ll be talking with Mike Knowles, John Brown and Andrew Smith. Mike will be chatting from his extensive experience about art in the region and particularly referencing the art of portraiture – in line with his daughter artist Emma Knowles’ exhibition at the Ucheldre Centre.
John Brown is curating an exhibition of artists from Wales in an international exhibition at the Streminski Academy of Art in Lodz, Poland next month. He will be joining us together with artist and Bangor University lecturer Andrew Smith to talk about this event:
So join us live on 102.5FM in the region or on-line at www.monfm.net from 10.00-11.00am gmt on Tuesday.
ICAW exhibiting in Poland.
New series of ‘The Art Lounge’ in planning now….
I’m so looking forward to this autumn..so much is happening. Exhibitions in Lithuania and at Griffin Gallery in London for one thing and then my new series of ‘The Art Lounge’, which will be live on FM for the first time, with Radio Mon FM 102.5FM, so Anglesey and Gwynedd county can tune in easily. We’re not just digitally available anymore , although we’ll still be doing that and hope to win back listeners in the US, Brazil, India, Argentina, Australia, Egypt, Finland, Spain and Korea…to name just a few locations!
‘The Nourishing’ (detail), exhibited Fez, April-May. La Festiival des Arts Plastiques de Fes 2014.
So artist friends, arts professionals and art lovers everywhere, tell me what you want to hear about and what you’ve got going on. Now’s the time to get in touch if you have any events you want flagged up, locally reviewed or any burning topics you want aired. I’m planning some round table discourse (well more like triangular table, given the studio furnishings….) …covering themes like gallery exhibiting, Open Studios, Art in Cafes, artist’s pay, art in war torn areas, and I want YOUR ideas too. Please email me at eli_acheson@hotmail.com. In the last series I interviewed illustrators, designers, painters, jewellers, glass artists, sculptors, performance artists, and photographers and I’m looking to include arts administrators too this time.
My Spring was busy with exhibitions in Spain and Morocco, and I started sending my sculptures abroad for the first time. I was thrilled to bring out my new catalogue with an insightful and so eloquent essay by Andrew Smith of Bangor University. A very hearty big Thank You to him. Hopefully soon I’ll have this in some additional languages but for now just in English, click on this link to see it.
Birds and bees – your poems revealed
I have real pleasure in sharing with you the entries in our Mon Cafe Poetry on the Radio challenge, set by poet Fiona Owen a few weeks ago. Many thanks to all our participants and to Fiona for encouraging these creative acts!
For more info on Mon Cafe’s periodic creative challenges on Radio Mon FM, check out : https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mon-Cafe/183871505107178?fref=ts
NOW AND THEN
I
Just a short jog to the June river
From our house in Thamesford, Ontario
Where pink peonies edge the driveway.
A box yew stands sentinel at the front door and
Being of Welsh origin we are the only cartref on
The block with a privet hedge marking a boundary.
Once we pass the hedge there are five more homes
Where we can smile at the neighbours sitting in
Their aromatic Adirondack chairs on painted porches.
Then we cross the River Road, enter the parkway and hear
The Thames tributary chortling along in expectation of its descent
Via a shallow waterfall to scuttle south under a road bridge and on.
II
In some ways, I am lost walking down Byron Avenue in June.
For over forty years I have forsaken this place as Wales calls
To me and I answer–with a suitcase and some waiting poems.
If I was there now I could follow my bliss and solemnly stroll
Down Pont-y-Capel Lane where fragrances of wild flowers
Leeks and linden capture my senses and carry me back in time
To childhood and Sunday morning strolls with my father.
This is Father’s Day and bluebells ring out their message
Of constancy, and honeysuckle spreads abundance and devotion.
A curlew lingers and haunts the space, a skylark cries.
The month of June, when the dew in Wales is heaviest
Begets the tears of my saddest day–my father’s early death.
III
Afon Alyn remembers our shadows and our brightness,
Our coming and our going, as cosy trees shroud over her
like a blue-green mantle in the twilight. While young foxes
Saved from road-kill, raised in captivity, now grown and free
Also remember us. And I too am free to be where I am.
Two countries, two homelands, in my head and heart.
© Beryl Baigent
Residents and Prisoners
Confined by weather, instead
I watch. The empty garden seats
settle back, bask in the rain.
They look expectant.
And visitors do come. Little
brown jobs – flycatchers? – hover
round the shrubs vibrating their wings
drab hummingbirds.
Snazzy cock pheasant saunters out
from behind the greenhouse,
crosses the lawn and stalks
right up to the window to peer in.
A blackbird commandeers
the fence just long enough for
a single rendering of his signature tune:
quick assertion of property rights. Then off.
And bees – more bees than I saw
all last summer – assiduous
as Japanese tourists at one hedge
of cotoneaster, though the buds are barely open.
But now an unlucky nuthatch, a scruffy
fledgling, panics into the greenhouse,
pinballing off the glass. Visitor
turned prisoner. I creep over,
leave the door open, cross my fingers.
Stevie Krayer
17 June 2013
Out of Synch… by Pauline Kenyon
This year the seasons are all jumbled
Flowers do not know their place,
They’re popping up in flowerbeds
Like some weird kind of race.
There’s blossom bursting skyward
Whilst the bluebells bloom below
Amongst azaleas and wallflowers
Brightly petalled as they grow.
The irises are gleaming –
With pansies pushing through
The yellowing leaves of daffodils
Glist’ning in the morning dew.
The clematis is high climbing
With blooms as big as dinner plates
As the weeds and grass zoom upwards
And tenacious bindweed gyrates.
What a tapestry of colour
A magic carpet of delight,
Despite the seasonal mayhem
Everything is quite all right!
The Furthest Edge
We lay under a tree
at the edge of the shining buttercupped field,
smelt greenness and May blossom.
Looked up through fresh, lace leaves
to the ocean-blue sky.
A blackbird voiced our joy.
But high above the living tree
were bare boughs thrusting up,
sombre, stencilled black against the sky.
Then, staring longer, we could see
a thousand glistening spiders’ webs
adorning every gnarl and fork,
swaying in the breeze.
And we imagined we beheld,
up there above our heads,
a hidden, dark, mysterious world,
a busy, scuttling pouncing place
at the very furthest edge
of the shining, sun-reflecting buttercups.
Joy Mawby 14.6.13
LIGHT OF DAY
In a first pink sky,
Unfurled, unformed, unstretched,
Our dawn of life is soft and thin,
Uncertain, curled in hidden possibility.
Light washes in a morning of colour,
A burst of buds, a promise of petals.
The shadows shorten.
Energy floods
And the grand rotation of the sun
Finds it vertical at noon,
Immediate,
A furious brilliance of light
With shadows short,
Acute and sharp.
At dusk the leaves are still
In shadow and translucent;
They gain a green they lost in the midday glare.
I see their shapes and how they have grown,
And the sky is the colours of any rose I have ever seen
In my life.
ANDREW WILLIAMSON
Mon Cafe programme 1
A chance to listen again to the first of my new arts chat shows ‘Mon Cafe’. Win the chance to read your writing on the air in reply to poet Fiona Owen’s writing challenge. Read about this here and get in touch soon !!
Big Digger begins at Anglesey Open Studios
My young assistant helps to paint blue ground on our new artwork..big brushes suit little hands so why are kids' brushes always tiny? "I want BIG DADDY BWUSH MUMMY".
Dr E and Life in the UK test, Pass!
Dr E has taken the day off work to do his ‘Life in the UK’ test in Manchester today. Thrills. So in an effort to prove that he knows a smidgeon about living here, this consultant dermatologist has had to take a day’s hospital leave, pay some more, travel some more, and sweat some more….not that we Brits necessarily already know just how many seats there are in parliament exactly….(some of his colleagues suggested “er…..three hundred and something??”, and I wasn’t exactly on the button either btw) or where the exact percentage of ethnic minority X lived or whether or how many funky anagrams you can get out of the phrase ‘the percentage of peoples of african or asian descent’…..fingers on the proverbials.
Well, revising it all made for yet another jolly weekend in the continuing story of our Anglo-Egyptian marriage. I have my own suggestions for questions though:
1. What is marmite? And how do you feel about it?
2. What is a panad? (Wales) [what is a cuppa? (rest of UK)]
3. What is the most popular topic of British conversation? And can you give 3 openings to a conversation with a complete stranger in Britain?
4. Do you believe in equality of driving rights for labradors?
5. Do you understand that in the first 50 metres of any public footpath, dogs have the right to pooh without obstruction?
6. Do you own or are you intending to own, a pair of wellies?
7. Do you believe in the supremacy of Red squirrels over Grey?
8. Have you had, or are you intending to have a bowl of tomato soup?
9. What is ‘strictly’?
10. Please say Llanfairpwllgwyngyll into this microphone. (You may have 3 attempts).
Answers:
1. Thick black delicious smelling paste. It’s my favourite, can’t do breakfast without it.
2. Cup of tea (with milk *bonus point, (authentic))
3. The Weather.
a: lovely morning innit
b: terrible weather innit
c: looks like it’s gonna be a wet one innit
4. I believe in equality for all. But they should definitely get their eyes tested first.
5. Yes.
6. Which is why I have a pair of wellies.
7. Yes, and I am a member of the ARSA (Anglesey Red Squirrel Appreciation society).
8. Yes, and I buy bulk packs.
9. Telly programme, and when I become famous I defowannabeonit.
10. (taped answers only allowed).
Congratulations! you have completed the test.
Dr E is sitting now. Results expected soon. …..
What are your best questions for the test in your area??
Love youse. x
Ornithology for beginners
Just about at the end of the month, new au pair arrived to a full week of Welsh sunshine shock – and after five months 100% mum, now back to blogging, art, writing and new programme planned for soon too……
BB is learning about birdwatching:
See sweetheart, that is a blue tit on the branch,
No mummy, that is NOT a blue tit, that is a little bird.
Good to be back, hi all.
Down to work.
Big FAT rain and too far from TOAF
A big welcome back to my readers after an extended autumnal blog recess. Car crashes are big eaters-up of time so I find, but finally am beginning to tick the final boxes on things such as medical reports and insurance claims…..and I did get to find out how having needles stuck in your spine really feels….warm, droopy and boggle-eyed as it goes.
And then, November brings exhibits in Barcelona (7th) and London (22nd)….a small highlight on wee BB’s hypnotic presence in one key painting…..TOAF – Eli Acheson
Still, trying to juggle being an artist with being a mum of a 2 year old, is proving tricky…magical though being mum of BB undoubtedly is, evening trampolining sessions have this week extended to at least 10pm for four of the last five nights…so coordinating some social media marketing for Magma Group clocks on at around quarter to fuzzy hour.
Our planned move to Dorset also got delayed by a morasma of different reasons and we find ourselves still battering down the hatches at our windy island outpost for another winter season…at least for the 4c-able. This week in prep for old kitchen rip-up, each day brings fresh insights on domestic rearrangements with joiners, plumbers, sparkies, painters, tilers etc. will be soooo good to be just BB and studio again afterwards.
More soonies.
Eli Acheson-Elmassry, Artist 