Sometimes things need to be celebrated and this is one of those times. The last day of a teaching career spanning 36 years. Exciting and challenging indeed! Nothing will change I think just the venues and the type of people I engage with. Exciting and challenging times ahead. Today, tomorrow and yesterday. Art is its own reward!

These images were taken in New York on two separate occasions. The figures are from Grand Central Station in January 2008 and the street scenes are from February 1996. In 1996 I bought a new film camera just before flying. It was faulty and produced some accidentally intriguing images. When I was back home in Liverpool I treated the images with a thermal fax machine (sadly no longer available) and the nature of the image has changed over the years - they turn a ghostly sepia colour and the image disappears if exposed to light. I've further treated these images in Photoshop recently and printed them on Hannemule digital paper using a laser printer. I was going to make woodcut prints or etchings from them but I think they stand on their own now. I am interested in memory and loss and the reinvigorating nature distance and, I suppose melancholy. How these images affect me as the artist is very profound. Hopefully there is a little of that for the beholder as well? The digital photographs from 2008 are manipulated in the camera and are in fact tiny sections of much larger original images. Similarly, their focus being one of leaving and arriving has conotaions of the 1996 set. There are many more in the two series - this is an example.

woodcuts from the Wood at Froggatt Edge - work in progress.

I was thinking about a rock that managed to maintain its existence by hovering. There are such moments of fantastic clarity when one is allowed to "dream with one's eyes open". Etching and aquatint.

These woodcuts are part of a current project on The Stations of the Cross. It's not possible to capture the delicate nature of the marks by scanning the prints but you get a rough idea I think.

http://vimeo.com/3092877 Anita Fontaine