The Manchester skyline, acting as a panoramic work of art in its own right.

We all love a day out don't we, well this tale of a little excursion actually started in a sunny Bordeaux square in early October 2024. Stuart Fraser and his wife Janet were enjoying a short break in this wonderful City, and sitting at a street cafe enjoying a superb glass of wine that Bordeaux is rightly famous for (as you do), when Stuart received a phone call from Danny Ibbotson, a very successful contemporary mixed media abstract artist. An Internationally renowned member of GNW and all round really nice guy. If you do not know Danny, then you must check him out on his website. https://www.danielibbotson.com/

Danny, who is a great sponsor of Gallery Northwest gave us a heads up on the upcoming Manchester Arts Fair. Indicating it might be something that we, as a gallery should investigate and offered complimentary tickets. This tied in nicely with our own conversations about plans and promotions for the gallery in 2025. As a result, fellow artist and GNW management team member Annie Stride and Stuart Fraser organised a jolly Gallery Northwest day out to the Manchester Art Fair in November 2024.
After a refreshingly pain free train journey from Carlisle, and a short walk from Oxford Road station we arrived at the magnificent venue at Manchester Central. First impression was wow, this is a very big arts fair! and a feast for the eyes of any lover of the Arts. With around 1000 stalls and booths and over 500 artists and galleries represented we really were confronted by a “horizon stuffed full of art across all genres”

One of Mark Demstead’s promotional images

The first stand we encountered on entry was showing the incredible figurative works of Mark Demsteader, very impressive indeed, and both Annie and Stuart found his complex layering and texturing process totally fascinating.
Mark’s use of lost and found edges, intense darks and subtle lights using multi glazed passages in a variety of media, created the perfect backdrop for the eye popping sections of very beefy impasto paint, applied with scrapers and knives to impart vivid accents of broken colour that stopped you in your tracks from a distance, drawing you in for a closer look.

what a great start to our day of all things arty. You might think it would be difficult to be impressed after our first encounter with Mark, but the opposite was true, we just kept meeting truly incredible and inspiring artists from all over the UK.
The breadth of work in many genres was breath-taking. Fabulous abstract and non abstract landscapes sat alongside still life, poster art, illustration, wonderful charcoal, ink and graphite works and some simply amazing sculpture.

We met Jane Evans who kindly demonstrated the Japanese art form of Gyotaku. A real fish or sea creature is inked (dead of course) and an impression is taken from it’s surface using cloth or paper. The origins of the practice pre date the camera and were used to record fishermens catch. As Jane has developed her skills with this technique she has also learned the Urauchi technique for making the prints flat so they can be framed. The printing process, by it’s nature means the paper she uses gets stretched and wrinkled pressing it against the surface of three dimensional objects, so in order to frame the work, Urauchi is necessary. The whole process was fascinating and judging by the number of red dots on her stall wall, it was not just us that were mesmerised.

We really enjoyed conversing with all the artists about their work and process, far too many to mention , but we will highlight a couple of other Cumbrian artists we encountered during the day.

First was a young man Dominic Richardson from Alston, England’s highest market town and not too far from our own gallery in Brampton. Dominic has a right sided paralysis and partial sightedness after a road crash, as a result he applies his oils directly with his left hand without a paint brush to create his sensory, layered paintings. Dominic was exhibiting in Manchester as part of a small collective and we wish him and his fellow artists all the best for the fair.

We also stumbled upon another Cumbria artist Mark Gibbs, Mark creates complex sculptures featuring animals, horsemen, and ships. Influenced by archaeology, his sculptures resemble ancient ritual artifacts with many layers of meaning.

Mark creates his intricate designs from recycled wire or clay, and birds from newspaper articles or even banknotes. He has exhibited widely regionally, nationally, and internationally. He won the 2020 RBSA Open Prize and exhibited alongside Matisse in ‘Matisse and Contemporary Paper Artists’, Rheged Gallery 2022. That year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists

Mark says his role is to bring materials to life to tell powerful stories. Well they certainly do.

Of course the real reason we were attending was to investigate whether Gallery Northwest might benefit from attending such fairs in the near future. Many of the conversations with exhibiting galleries were about their experience and the viability of what is a rather large financial outlay. As you can imagine as a gallery, we would need to choose a good sized booth to be able to highlight some of the fabulous artists we promote. The conclusions that we gathered observations and comments, from the many galleries and artists we spoke to were really positive. Certainly it was very, very busy and we spotted many red dots around the venue, so sales were being made.

All in all it was a feast for the eyes and a wonderful artistic day out, and who knows maybe we will be blogging about our own stands soon.

A Horizon full of Art

In Praise of Cornish