The River on Show

Fortingall Art is on the go this week, with our Splinter Group River project all hung in its little alcove in the Molteno Hall.   It’s probably our most ambitious and diverse show there to date.  The River theme has proved a real inspiration. It brought out all our individual styles and allowed us to broaden out our printmaking too.  Alyson MacNeill has done a series of beautifully detailed and -lively multi-coloured lino prints inspired by the rivers Tay and Dee and the birds, people and trees that live along them.  Philippa Swann has been playing with monoprints and reflections in moving water to make exquisite wood engravings that show her love of pattern and texture.   Becky Coope has produced a series of precisely cut and elegant wood engravings of the buildings and landmarks around the mouth of the Tay at Dundee and Brought Ferry and Penny Kennedy played with patterns formed by her dumpy little dippers amongst round river pebbles and joyful jumping fish.  And Linda Farquharson showed her naked lady lying in the landscape and smothered in flowers.  What next?

The River

July and Fortingall Art is coming around again. This annual exhibition, which is held in the Molteno Hall in the picture-on-a-chocolate-box village of Fortingall in Highland Perthshire, is becoming an annual spur to us in the Splinter Group to come up with a themed exhibit of our wood engravings. After last year’s calendar, when the six of us engraved a couple of months each on four inch square blocks, we decided we wanted to do something a bit looser and with a bit more scope for individual style. So we came up with ‘The River’ as our theme. There’s plenty of inspiration from the river Tay and its tributaries, even when it’s running so low as it is just now with all this hot, dry weather. As usual we all feel that we would like more time, but that’s the way things are, hopefully it means it’s a work in progress.

My main piece is a combination of lino and wood engraving to illustrate a poem I wrote ‘Salmon Leaping at the Hermitage’. It feels quite liberating to mix media by using it to complement my words and to expand my image making on wood by using lino, which is a scale I’m more comfortable with. I’ve also been experimenting with mono printing to get some watery backgrounds for my wood engraved fish.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 27th July to Sunday 4th August and has a snazzy new website www.fortingallart.co.uk.