LI JUN - Chinese Painting and Calligraphy workshop

Christine and I met Li Jun when we were in Wuxi, China. He demonstrated his fabulous free brush/ink painting style and then generously gave us the paintings.
He and some artist friends of his are coming to visit us here on the Sunshine Coast at the end of March.

He is doing a demonstration and two x 1day workshops.

These are the lovely paintings he did for us :

Let me know if you'd like to come to one of the workshops - should be fun.

A Book of Numbers

Last week, Fiona and I attended a Glen Skein workshop at the Cooroy Butter Factory Arts precinct. We had a great day and played with collage and printing onto book pages. Glen is very non precious about his printmaking, so we used rollers, heavy plastic plates, textures and fabrics - both positive and negative images. Check out his website - his work is amazing - so beautiful and full of mysterious text and imagery.

Glen showed us a quick and easy binding technique creating crosses on the spine,

I haven't glued down the end papers yet - not sure whether I should do this or leave the book 'undoable'. What do the book binders say about this?? 

I wasn't greatly happy with my printmaking results [a hot day and water based inks didn't help], but I played with text for the first time, and stuck with circles and stumpy straight lines. Loved the text - snippets of words and the numbers appeared serendipidously [is this a word?].

Once home I did my usual thing - doubled the number of pages, made the book into a 1 to 10 text [8 pages for each number], and made a cover.

It is 13cm x 9.5cm x 2.5 cm

I have been playing with rusting, dying and staining sheets of paper [tea, inks, 'bruised' textured paper] and have ended up with some fascinating and beautiful results - many have been used in this book.

Here is a selection of pages....

Great fun - thanks Glen.