A Postcard From the Barn - April 2026
- Su France
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
,
bluebells &
hares running wild
April keeps you guessing, and this year more than most. The sky has been doing extraordinary things — long stretches of a washed, particular blue that makes the fields and hedges beneath it look almost theatrical in their greenness, and then without much warning a charcoal cloud-mass, noisily rolling in and turning everything underneath it an unnerving lilac, long before the heavy rain even arrives. It shakes the cherry blossom however the delicate petals always surprise me with how few of them leave their tree early and turn to a pink snowfall.
We've had hail this week, proper bouncing hail completely out of nowhere, and then within the half hour the most vivid rainbows I can remember seeing in years. Not the tentative, half-there kind, but full confident double arcs, brighter than you think they could be, the sort that make you stop whatever you're doing and just stand there for a moment. They're one of those events to marvel, wide-eyed, rather than spent the time looking through your phone screen at.
Five hares, on the newly ploughed field, played. Movement at first, then the characteristic lolloping run you'd know anywhere, before all five of them are suddenly in full flight, blurring across the bare dark earth, going somewhere with great urgency or simply for the joy of it, with hares it's always hard to tell. There's something about a hare crossing an open field that makes the whole landscape feel more alive, as though it was waiting for exactly that.
The Red Arrows have been out practicing too, which around here is just part of the texture of Spring days. You hear them first, a specific roar across the sky, and then there they are; looping, banking and descending with breathtaking confidence, impossibly low over the cars moving along the road beneath. I've watched them often enough to know the surprise never quite leaves you.
I walked down into the woodland yesterday and the path is already being reclaimed. Bluebells coming through in proper drifts now, not quite at their peak but nearly, the blue that defeats every camera I've ever pointed at it. Stitchwort threaded through inbetween them, small, white and exact. And wild garlic is on its way, a smell that arrives long before you see the plants, a green living smell rising up from the ground, which is the right way wild garlic should announce itself. I'll soon be out photographing it and breathing in its scent. In the meantime here are some images of a grey/ pink day where light came into my lens, through last years delicate hydrangea bracts.
Leicester Print Works - create beautiful monoprints in this workshop, with me
The places for my From Plant to Print Summer School at the brilliant inky venue of Leicester Print Works are on sale now.
There are still a few spots remaining if you've been thinking about it.
We'll spend the 5 days working with Gelli plates, foliage, and layers of colour, building up prints that have real depth and personality.
You'll choose your own palette, work with plants and found leaves, and go home with a body of work you actually want to put on a wall. It's a small group, so we work at an unhurried pace, and genuinely all levels are welcome, the process is intuitive and endlessly surprising, which is half the pleasure of it.
Leicester Print Works is a wonderful place to spend a few day creating.
It's where I'm a member, so it feels welcoming and familar to me, and I think you'll love it too; a proper working print studio, full of the right kind of atmosphere and the very particular smell of ink.
Come and spend summer days making something beautiful.
Find me here - The Ropewalk Print Fair
Speaking of print workshop memberships, I'm also a member at the Ropewalk in Barton on Humber, which puts me neatly halfway between two wonderful places to make work. I'll be selling prints there so do come along if you can, and while you're there you'll also get to see an exhibition that I'd really encourage you not to miss. Helpful directions may be downloaded below.
Chris Brook's Mixed Messages exhibition is running until the end of May and it really spoke my language. Mark making is at the heart of everything Chris does too, he's drawn to the partially revealed, to the fragile and eroded remnants that our eyes and instincts somehow still know how to read. There's a painstaking slowness to these works, a finely crafted layering of time and place beneath the surface, narratives half-hidden below the paint, and there's something mesmerising about spending time with them.
I'd actually met Chris before, at the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair in Manchester, and we'd had one of those conversations that stays with you, both of us confessing to a deep love of weathered surfaces, rusty finds, the worn and discarded object that other people walk past but that we somehow feel compelled to bring home and place deliberately, reverently on a shelf. Treasure!
At the private view, he mentioned that someone had observed his audience tend to share a particular visual language, the kind of people, he said, who collect pebbles and carry them in their pockets. I knew exactly what he meant and having seen his repeated circles I showed him photos I'd taken only the evening before of rusted circles on a concrete wall, drawn to their sparse arrangement, the way they sat together, without explanation.
A different kind of pebble, but one we both understood instinctively, as worth holding onto and drawing inspiration from. Below you can see a few of my (soon to be printed large) plates (the honey coloured images) and 'that wall!' Then there some glimses of Chris's exhibition.
Saying goodbye to my lodger, my first etching press
My Gunning etching press is for sale, and I wanted to mention it here in case its of interest. It's the press I've worked on for the past four years. Every collagraph and drypoint course I've run from the home studio has come through this press, and if you've ever spent a day printing here, this is the one. It deserves to go somewhere it will be used and loved.
It's listed on eBay and I've added the link below, do pass it on if you know anyone who might be looking.
In the next newsletter I'll introduce you to its larger cousin, which, new to me, has settled in beautifully and is already making itself at home.
My intention was to use it for bigger, more ambitious work, and that's coming — but as you'll see below, it has so far inspired something altogether quieter. Small woodland pieces, earth pigment and ink together, something light and something earthy in the same work.
They're being created possibly for a group exhibition called Root and Branch, which my work will be part of later this year, and I can't wait to tell you more about that when the time comes. Here's a peek.
My Visitor Centre Commission
Earlier this week I made the drive over to Oxcombe in the Wolds, down that lane that is currently lined with an extraordinary amount of cow parsley — not quite in flower yet but massing on both sides, that particular green froth of it that tells you summer is only just holding back.
I spent the morning in the visitor centre getting things ready, which turned out to mean a good deal of measuring and holding and drilling on repeat before the triptych was up and sitting right. Three panels of earth pigment on linen — the red and white chalk of the Wolds, its undulating fields and the quality of light that moves across that landscape in a way I find endlessly worth trying to catch. The work is semi-abstract, not a faithful record but something that I hope still holds the feeling of the place.
The family who farm the land hadn't seen the finished work at that point, which felt like a significant moment. This is their landscape, intimately known and lived in, and I am curious to know how my interpretation of it will land with them.
That particular conversation is still to come and yes I am again matching the colours in my work!
There will be more on this in the next newsletter, but Open Studios will soon be on my 'to do list' and this year I am taking part as venue 14, at my home studio, as part of Creative Lincs Art Trail, so here are the dates to add to your diary.
Enjoy your week
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