I'm in hospital, posting this via my mobile. This means I won't be able to fulfill any orders. If you have an order you should hold off for now. I don't want to take your money and have you waiting several weeks before I can even send it. If you want to reserve something not available in multiples send me an e-mail in the interim.

I hope to be up and running again in a couple of weeks, but won't know for sure until tomorrow.

I've noticed that my previous post has lost the link it should have had - I'll restore that asap.

I haven't posted in a while, a problem with my foot has meant I haven't been in the studio much and so have little of my own work to talk about. For some reason this has also impacted on my other blogging. The hiatus has made me think therefore about the way in which this blog in particular is going.

Initially I had high intentions of creating a wide ranging resource for artists covering business planning, profiles of other artists and general posts on art matters. I recognise that was ambitious of course. The business planning work has gone no where - it is difficult to build up enthusiasm for a business plan when the business is moribund. I had some early success with profiles, but although I have had lots of acceptances, artists generally tend to be less good at following through. I haven't harassed people about this apart from a few gentle reminders, so they have fallen by the wayside. I have one still to post, so watch this space.

My own work is picking up again and I've made some new monotypes - all tiny - so although I do not want this blog to be about my own work exclusively there will be some posts soon on work in progress. This may rekindle the business planning work, we will have to see.

The music posts are fun to do, but in order to avoid copyright problems I want to use YouTube or Vimeo videos and I have had reports that these posts are causing problems for some people. I will come back to them, but I suspect I will only embed one or two and provide links to the rest. I will also experiment with embedding lower resolution versions.

Longer posts on art are more of a problem. I'm not sure how much interest there is in these but in any case writing them takes time and I need to be inspired and as ever inspiration has been in short supply lately.

So, for the future expect posting to be irregular and when it comes to be more about my own work than anything else. Thoughts and ideas on topics to be covered would be welcomed.

In fifteenth century Japan, a shogun damaged a precious Chinese bowl, causing cracks to splinter across the small vessel. Fearful of the cracks growing, the shogun took the bowl to a craftsman and asked him to repair it in such a way that it would become more valuable than before. The craftsman filled the cracks with lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold. Called kintsugi, “golden joinery” in English translation, the technique became highly desired, and it wasn’t long before cracked and repaired pottery was more valuable than pristine vessels.

You can see more in the video and read the full blog post on Etsy here.

New Kintsugi, gold repair from Humade on Vimeo.

I didn't do any printmaking or painting over the Christmas holiday period. This holiday for me has always been about relaxing with family, reading lots of books and generally not doing a great deal.

However, trying to pick up again after the break has been hard. I seem to have hit a dry spell. Such few ideas that have struck have not worked out in practice. I've done some painting, but all of it so far has been picking up existing work. Getting inspiration for new stuff has been hard.

After a while I decided to stop trying to force things and do some writing instead, for here and for my other, politically focused, blog. For me though, writing anything over a few paragraphs takes time, because I need to build a logical structure to a piece even before I begin the process of editing and polishing.

So blog posts for here on the idea of 'Cultural Appropriation' and about my visit to the Gerhard Richter show at Tate Modern and for my other blog on a range of topics including the Occupy movement, pop up shops and galleries and on the increasing trend for political power to become increasingly concentrated in a small political class are all unfinished!

Advice for writers on beating writers block is usually to keep writing. It works because if all else fails the only thing you waste is time, and if you work your way through the blog block that isn't in the end wasted. Printing is something else though. My last three sessions at college have been a total bust, with nothing to show at all, while several days work in my own studio have been frustrating and depressing, with nothing produced worth keeping and many false starts, wasting ink and paper.

So how do you get through a creatively fallow period? Do you work on regardless, knowing much of what you do will be wasted or do you change tack, perhaps drawing or taking photographs instead of working in your usual medium? Please share your own experiences and practice - in the comments below rather than in the various fora to which I usually post links to blog posts.

While reading a book called Writing about art by Marjorie Munsterberg (also a web site), I came across something I found rather shocking. She quotes a passage by John Ruskin in which he describes a painting by Turner.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night.  The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm.  Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood.  Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam.  They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying.  Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

[Ruskin’s note]*She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard.  The near sea is encoumbered with corpses.

What I found shocking was not Ruskin's verbosity, which is characteristically High Victorian, but Professor Munsterberg's comments on it.

Ruskin drew upon an immense vocabulary, using many words that are unfamiliar today.  Even his Victorian contemporaries regarded his style of writing as exceptional.  It shows the influence of the King James translation of the Bible and, in this particular passage, Shakespeare.  These are references that Ruskin assumed his audience would understand, although any modern reader needs a dictionary and specialized knowledge to follow them. (emphasis added)

I accept that detailed knowledge of Shakespeare is rare these days (although I picked up the Shakespearean reference without too much difficulty), but reading the passage again I though that there was at most one word - incarnadines - that might cause problems and that the long sentences required care in navigation but otherwise the passage was not especially problematic.

Bearing in mind that the book is intended for degree level students (so far as I can determine from the City College of New York web site) are literacy levels of undergraduate students so impoverished these days? The book overall (especially the examples of assignments) seems to me not so much about the language of art and how to use it, but almost remedial level English.

Am I missing something? I do hope so.

I've had a Tumblr site for ages now, but to be honest I had forgotten about it. I'm going to resuscitate it as a sort of commonplace book with brief posts on items that catch my attention but don't relate to this or my other blog.

I'm in the process of setting up my studio to fit in my new press from Hawthorn. I'm lucky to have a dedicated room for it, but it is still essentially a spare bedroom so space is tight. The press is on a table with lockable wheels so I can move it into the corner when not in use.

To the left, out of shot, are shelves for paper, frames, card, art materials etc. The green trays behind the press hold inks, spatulas and more materials. The tray for wetting paper is stored on top of the shelves when not in use.

This is the work area. It used to be the place for my PC, two monitors, scanner, two printers and sundry other bits and pieces but these have now moved to an attic office (where I am a s I write this) and where my digital prints will be made. Underneath the work area are plastic waste bins full of cloths, coffee jar lids (for small quantities of paint used when glazing) and other containers. The pictures on the left hand side are screen prints (work in progress) sitting for the moment on the blotting paper for drying. Under the low table are more canvases, while on it is a wooden chopping board as a work surface plus several sheets of toughened glass on which to roll out the inks.

The three engravings on the wall came from Etsy by an artist called Valdas Misevičius, from Lithuania, while the small one just visible behind the light was a blog giveaway by the artist Leslie Avon Miller. Out of shot is a painting by Tina Mammoser (the Cycling Artist on Etsy) plus a studio easel and yet more storage and shelving..

Now I'm set up, I can't wait to get working. Having a press at home will I hope do wonders for my productivity, because I don't have to fit everything I do into a 2½ hour time slot in the college studio. I'm keeping up my attendance there too however - it gives me the chance to talk to others and also to use equipment I can't squeeze into my own studio, like vacuum bed screen printing frames, relief printing presses and a UV exposure unit for making photo etching plates.

I found this great tip on brush care at the Mokuhankan Conversations blog.

Just a note to say that I haven't forgotten this blog, just that other things have kept popping up. Now the room in which I have my computer is due to be decorated so I won't have internet access for the next week or so. My intention of having numerous posts scheduled for the period hasn't quite worked out either...

I realised that the 'About Me' page I had drafted had never been loaded, so I have fixed that. You can find a link in the top menu bar and in the menu at the bottom of every page.

If the cherry blossom is anything to go by, we are in for a colourful summer.

Of course it is a transient beauty.