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

http//www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/

Steven Connor is a thinking man. One of his most recent books is a History of Flies in poetry.

Art is dreaming with your eyes open
Philip Guston

Three of the photographs I took with my Blackberry whilst driving back and forth across

the Penines during the winter. The art of chance once more. With an outstretched hand to my left (mostly) I "snapped" at random when it was safe to do so. Sometimes when it wasn't such a wise thing to do. Perhaps these are the better photographs - the unwise ones! I shall never know.

Here are the two plates inked up and the subsequent print from one of them. I'm tempted to leave them alone but then again - printmaking is a very organic process and prompts one to tinker with the subject in question until it makes its own mark in the world.

Two scans from the lino blocks I am working on currently. The caustic soda that I use to make the etched marks has a violent beauty that is very distinctive and makes impressive artworks of the blocks themselves. The details of the etch aren't particularly evident here. The colours are glorious and delicate.

Two Figures (an etched linocut) is related to Bird Device in as much as they were both born out of meanderings in woodland that I frequent. I either work from memory or from tiny drawings that I make on site. A good quote I found by Kiki Smith from 1998 sums up my belief in the power of Printmaking: "Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet everyone is different. I also think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries."

Bird Device is a digital image that I have developed from a photogram of some drawings that I made on tracing paper and acetate. They will act as a starting point for a series of woodcuts/linocuts/drypoints that I intend to make shortly. I'm not sure at the moment which way to orientate them but that will all come out in the wash as they say. The appearance of the bird form was initially accidental or rather the consequence of abstraction. One might call it serendipity.

Three Automatic Drawings I made while showing my students Being John Malkovich. This was part of a lecture on the CUT -UPS of William Buroughs and John Gysin. I showed a collaborative film also by the same pair. Very demanding but inevitably inspiring. It's a constant wonder to me how much "stuff" is out there and how much we can learn from one another.