Ensemble 360 @ Millennium Gallery

On 22nd April 2009, members of Ensemble 360 performed in Sheffield's Millenium Gallery, with a promenading audience. I had a go at photographing this event. Not easy, as the light levels were diabolically low and flash would have spoiled the experience for the audience. The required wide apertures, slow shutter speeds and maximum camera sensitivity conspired to limit the quality of the images, but I've put a few on my website.

Artists Open Studios South Yorkshire 2009

Enjoyed two weekends visiting studios around Sheffield during this year's Open Up event. There were way too many to get round all of them, but those I did manage to catch included:

• Penny Withers' fine ceramics
• Kristan Baggaley's dramatic paintings, including atmospheric seascapes alongside Derbyshire's gritstone edges
• Cath Dunn's semi-abstract landscapes, in a fascinatingly distinctive, almost constructivist, style
• Katherine Rhodes, whose excellent flowers and landscapes I've reproduced, also showed impactful figures
  
• Strong colours in acrylic and gouache from Terry Brooker
• Simon Clements was showing prints, etchings and watercolours, including cityscapes, landscapes, industrial scenes and musicians in concert. Simon told me he'd sold some of my prints of his watercolours.
• Erica Just, an out-of-town guest with Sheffield friends, with finely executed original watercolours inspired by grasses. I sought these out as a challenge for my Imaging for Artists service. Any attempt to reproduce these paintings must leave the large areas of unpainted white space untouched by ink in the reproduction. But Erica declared herself robustly uninterested in reproductions of her work, preferring these to remain prized as originals.
• Toby Hazel's colourful abstract acrylics, including some made whilst blindfolded. I was drawn to those reminiscent of Miro and Kandinsky. In a classic "village Sheffield" moment, I enjoyed telling Toby that, in the 1970's, his neurosciences PhD supervisor, Paul Dean, had stayed with me when I lived opposite Toby's home and studio.
• Neil Kay's small-scale but highly atmospheric acrylic and soft pastel landscapes of mountains, moors, wetlands and seashores. Neil's name was familiar to me as Sheffield's Director of Social Services way back when ...
• Alison Down's evocative watercolours and mixed-media paintings of landscapes, streetscapes, still life and gardens
• Steve Elliott's impressively large display of Derbyshire pastels and oils, which showed a compelling evolution over time towards increasing abstraction as well as an increasingly distinctive and dramatic colour palette.
• Martin Field's splendid photography -- landscapes and seascapes -- using square format and wide angles to great compositional effect, with a delicious range of tones and colours
• Lyn Littlewood's brilliantly colourful Derbyshire landscapes and flowers. Her home and studio nestle deep in the hills beneath Stanage Edge. When I got into embarrassing difficulties turning my camper van in their narrow lane, Lyn's husband kindly and expertly rescued me.