Hello there!  If you’ve been following this blog you will know that we’ve been in the process of creating a website for Myrtle Street Studio – and we are very pleased to announce that it is now live!  Just in time for our first birthday in March too….

So, we highly recommend checking it out here, and while you are at it, subscribing to the RSS feed on our new blog location here as we are migrating from WordPress also.

We look forward to seeing you at the new blog and hope you enjoy checking out the new website – let us know what you think!

Would you like to see those sneak-peak images of the letterpress work for our upcoming exhibition ‘Collected Patterns: The botany of Walter Hill’ by KT Doyle?  The online arm of Habitus Living magazine has just released an article on KT and Myrtle Street Studio which gives a few more details on the exhibition along with some close-up images of the lovely letterpress work to be exhibited.  Many thanks to the great staff at Habitus for their work!

Wanting to know a little bit more about our next exhibitor?  KT Doyle is an artist and designer with a passion for textiles, patterns and making the world a greener place.  You can read more about her wallpapers, textiles and prints here.  KT also has a blog which she is sharing information on about ‘Collected Patterns: The botany of Walter Hill’ in the lead-up to the opening of the exhibition at Myrtle Street Studio.  I highly recommend checking out this post where you can see a little bit of the letterpress action that has been going on at Myrtle Street Studio towards finalising the artwork – and we’ll be revealing some snippets of the artwork itself later this week, so stay tuned!

Just a quick note to let anyone interested know that I will be teaching a semester course on Wednesday mornings at the BIA (Brisbane Institute of Art) in Introductory Printmaking.  If you are keen to participate or just curious, click here for more details and to enrol!

Unfortunately, many people have not been so lucky and with the water set to rise again this afternoon I wanted to take this opportunity to impart some useful information to those of you who are being affected by the flooding.  This is especially for people who may have had to leave their homes without being able to take anything with them.

Some of the most important possessions in a home are paper-based – photographs, historical documents, certificates, artworks and the list goes on.  Some of these items may not have been digitized and may be irreplaceable.  If you are someone who is possibly going to be salvaging a flood devastated home in the coming weeks, I’ve quickly put together some information below which may be of assistance:

The State Library of Queensland:  has a conservation and preservation unit which has staff with excellent training in how to deal with water damaged paper-based work/documents.  Please note though that the SLQ itself has been affected by the flooding.  Currently the website is offline and the phone line to the department mentioned is engaged.  It would be best if possible to give the guys there some breathing space over the next couple of weeks to get themselves in order, they are still flooded in!

So, in the meantime, there are links below which will take you to some online information on what you can do in the meantime:

The National Archives of Australia have a page on what to do when recovering records from a flood.  The University of Nebraska (Lincoln) also has an excellent page on the cleaning and repair of water damaged paper, books and art.  World Printmakers also has some good general advice on caring for paper-based works and the Bishop Museum of Hawai’i  has a concise paper on disaster preparedness and recovery for works of art on paper.

I’m sure that much more information can be found online but this is a good place to start.  Also, if you find that you will need the assistance of a conservator in the coming weeks, please contact us as we know a few very good ones who we can recommend personally.

In the meantime, stay safe, off the roads so emergency services can do their jobs and wait for the water to subside fully before  attempting to retrieve precious items from your home.

We are celebrating World Pinhole Day this year with our very own Pinhole Photography Competition!!  Entries will be exhibited at Myrtle Street Studio as part of an exhibition in April, 2011.  Happy New Year!

A big thank you to everyone who braved the bad weather in the first week of December to come along and check out the Penny Black Exhibition and Zine Launch!  It was a fun exhibition to end the year on and I enjoyed getting the chance to educate people on what exactly zines are…

We are about to ‘close up shop’ for the year, it’s been a big one and I’m well and truly looking forward to the Xmas break.  I haven’t had much of a chance recently to get out of the studio but am hoping to see the latest exhibition on offer from the Redland Art Gallery (Cleveland) over the break - ‘Brushstrokes from the Bush: an Exhibition by the Botanical Artists’ Society of Queensland Inc’.  There will be many beautiful watercolours to view!

Speaking of artwork – please stay tuned for our first exhibition in 2011 which will showcase the amazing work of KT Doyle - ‘Collected Patterns: The botany of Walter Hill’.  This promises to be a ‘must see’ event on the gallery rounds for 2011 and we’ll be uploading more information when we come back online at the start of February.

In the meantime, a big thank you for the support we’ve received this year as we’ve got this baby off the ground – we look forward to bringing you another year of exciting gallery exhibitions and perhaps a few surprises too (click here if you’d like to read more on one of them!) – happy holidays from all of us at MSS!

Ok, so I happen to be the ninth artist involved in the Penny Black Project.  If you haven’t already checked my work out you can see a little bit more of it here and I have a bit of a bio here.  The image above was my offering for Project 1 – I had been trying to get into this project just before leaving for San Francisco mid-2010 so while I was away I kept mulling it over in my brain.  When I got back home I used some of the photo’s I had taken with my pinhole camera while at Crown Point Press to create photogravure prints (I was learning a photogravure technique at Crown Point so it was a very appropriate choice).  Then I overlaid (in colour according to project) the images of each stamp via screenprinting onto the photogravures.  In this way, reflecting a little of my thoughts while away.  Your own artwork is sometimes hard to explain to other people (the explanation above is a little simplistic) so I hope this makes some sense!

By the way!  The artwork I created for this show is available in an edition of 10 with 8 of these for sale to the public at the moment!  Along with this are a lovely set of letterpressed prints from Manuela Dobelin’s ’3 Umbrellas’ and ‘BBQ’ images as well as E J Zyla’s creations!  Very affordable artwork for a ‘hard to buy for’ friend or relative!!

So if you haven’t been down to see us yet – please do!  We are open from Wednesday to Friday (12noon to 6pm) and this Saturday from 10am to 4pm.  This is our last exhibition for the year so if you’ve been meaning to drop by and check us out – now is the time to do it!  We hope to see you soon.