What did you do over the Summer?

As the kids head back to school, either by standing up in front of the class or putting pen to paper, or clicking away at a keyboard—thousands of them will answer the question, “What did you do during Summer Vacation?

CAN Journal visited London and Wales in June, and while this was technically a vacation, no one will be surprised to hear that we didn’t stop working. It is nonetheless a joy to report that if you ever want confirmation that artists the world over have more in common than not, you could do a lot worse than traveling and talking to them. Specifically, everywhere we went we found artists and art organizations addressing similar sentiments and facing the same kinds of challenges with similar aplomb.

Tate Modern

There we were in London, for example, and after visiting the Tate Modern, where we saw a shouting, snaggle-toothed creature –Al Fuoco! Al Fuoco! (Fire! Fire!) by Enrico Baj (which reminded us Scott Pickering’s monsters); and Mario Merz’s woven willow form, Cone (which reminded us of the vessels created by Charmaine Spencer); and Bob and Roberta Smith’s gathered text installation Thamesmead Codex (which by the storytelling and crowd-sourced nature of its texts reminded us of Liz Maugans), and an entropic installation of everyday objects by Sarah Sze (which reminded of the tornadic installations of Jen Omaitz); and where we also saw works of Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois, the amazing Tanks (with works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nikita Gale and Anna Daucikova, and Marcel Duchamp and the Guerilla Girls), and quite literally a hundred others—after all that we wondered where we might find artists who are not yet famous. So on the banks of the Thames, just a few hundred feet away from Shakespeare’s Globe, we found a trio of poets-for-hire, plying their trade for the tourists. And if you ever want to know about local artists, you could do a lot worse than asking the local poets.  They steered us to Cockpit, an open-studio event far from the heart of London.

Cockpit Open Studios

Cockpit is a long-running (since 1986) social enterprise–group of individual artists who have made studios in a couple of adaptively re-used, formerly vacant buildings. We visited the one in Deptford.  It runs like a non-profit organization. No one we talked to could tell us what the building had been in its previous life, but it looked like it might have been a school.  The feel inside was reminiscent of Cleveland/Lakewood’s Screw Factory: not galleries presenting regular shows, but a gathering of artists and makers who use these studios as a workplace, holding open studio events about twice a year.  Generally the level of craft was very high.  There were jewelers, weavers, woodworkers, ceramic artists, printmakers, and more. Unlike open studio artists in Cleveland, they did charge a small admission fee (10 pounds at the door), which supports the collective effort. They publish a program for each of their bi-annual studio events, and print some other promotional material, in addition to running a website and some social media. Artists are on-site with inventories of their works for sale, and all we met were eager to talk. They talked to each other, too: how was the level of traffic so far, and this time versus last time, and were the people buying? Top of mind for all, it seemed, was how to turn this beautiful work into a living.

Screen printmaker Kethi Copeland translates her precise drawings of London architecture to multi-layered, multicolored works, which any printmaker would recognize as remarkable feats of registration. But time and skill cost money, hundreds of pounds, in fact, making those sales less frequent. Like just about every maker we know, she has looked for ways to make small, affordable, salable things that people browsing casually will buy on a whim.  By excerpting architectural details from some of her larger prints, and using other drawings, she created a line of greeting cards. And while her first runs of such cards were in fact screen printed, she has since turned to printing them digitally.  Those sales – along with teaching print workshops – support the rest of her practice.  Artists’ struggle to be paid fairly for their time seems to be universal.

Hey, Hay!

Our travels took us to Hay-on-Wye, a small town of about 2,000 people on the Welsh-English border. A town that size in rural Wales might well be a struggling place, but in the way that the arts have rescued the economic fate of some US neighborhoods, we found it teeming with visitors who had come for books—antiquarian books, especially—as well as printed maps, art and related things. Indeed, the tiny town of Hay-on-Wye is home to more than 20 book shops, in addition to its several galleries and related studios. It got that way because a bookseller named Richard Booth arrived in town in the 1970s, opened a second-hand book shop, declared himself king, appointed a cabinet, issued passports, and commissioned a flag. All this generated some buzz, and other booksellers set up shop, and eventually launched the Hay Festival. The place is now world famous as a destination for bibliophiles.

While there, we happened upon the opening reception for what you’d have to call a charming exhibition in a gallery called The Chair—Moments with Dad, a collection of paintings and drawings by Tom Evans. The subject was his father in casual, everyday moments at leisure—reading on the beach, playing cards, grilling food. Evans and his dad were both there, chatting with guests. The paintings were nostalgic and friendly and accessible, because, well, a lot of us have seen our own fathers doing those things.

To the point about artists making careers, we met The Chair’s manager, Jessie Dixon, who told us how the gallery works: Believing there are a lot of artists ready for a gallery show who have not yet managed to get representation in a traditional gallery, the proprietor of The Chair’s older sister gallery, The Table, Val Harris opened the new venue with a different model: Instead of the gallery taking the risk and taking a cut of sales as a commission, The Chair offers “Walls for a Week” for lease. It offers a bricks-and-mortar presence in a great location, the validation and imprimatur of a functioning venue, and some support, but it’s up to the artist to do most of the promotion and handle the sales. For 800 pounds per week, they get the walls for a week, a key, design of a postcard which the artist can pay to have printed, or simply email, collaborative publicity using contacts, and for additional fees a critique and consultation on the work,  the design of an e-catalog, and even the creation of a video documentary about the artist and the show. Cleveland has a measure of this in Studio 215 at 78^th Street Studios, and perhaps other venues as well.

Nearby we found artist Barry Martin Andrews in his own shop, Hawthorn Gallery. Andrews’s works are, by his own description, “atmospheric Welsh Landscapes” made from ink, pigment, soot, ash, charcoal, tannin, metal powders and other material. They are gorgeously monocrhomatic and moody mountains, trees, lakes and seas. The originals are for sale, but to keep the cash flowing he also sells digital prints, and features functional wood turning, ceramics, and jewelry by other local artists.

Around the corner found Aidan Saunders’s relief print shop The Prints of Hay, and just a little farther down, Graeme Hobbs’ letterpress shop, Fallow Pages.  Hobbes, in addition to his own books, uses the production capacity of the letterpress to make a line of sweet and thoughtful, hand-colored greeting cards. Saunders—who once made a print with then-prince,  now-King Charles—makes linocut images inspired by music, especially the Blues. The colorful, hand-inked prints of course are the main event, but he augments sales among the tourists by selling both one-color inked prints, and also digital prints.  He engages the public with a weekly printing session on a historic press at the nearby Hay Castle.

We bought and traded works in several of the above galleries, and came home with a feeling of solidarity. As summer turns to fall and the holidays, we know that across international boundaries, our peers will be looking to indoor shows and seasonal shoppers to bolster their accounts. Artists and makers across the world, unite! We’re all in this together.