Following our summer hiatus, we met this month in MadLab’s temporary home at New Federation House, currently managed by Castlefield Gallery. The primary aim of the meeting was to review recent feedback from CRITsurvey 2014 and make some key decisions on the future of the group to make sure it continues providing motivation, support and social contact for those pursuing a creative visual practice in Manchester.

Our main concern is that we want to continue to see regular involvement in the meetings; not necessarily huge numbers or the same people coming every single month, but enough to provide varied and meaningful feedback discussion for those who do attend. We had previously tried to achieve this consistent interest by running collaborative and research projects, one of which culminated in a group show, as well as hosting a series of speakers. Whilst these had been successful in many ways, it was noted that numbers were starting to drop off throughout 2014. Feedback from the survey and analysis in our discussion tonight suggested that aside from practical reasons like timing, this might be because the format had become a bit too formal and structured. We also felt that some people who had dropped in to see what we were about found it difficult to engage with a group who was already involved in a project spanning several sessions. The main thing we concluded was that due to our focus on these additional activities, we had started to run out of time to for informal critique on practical work; the very thing we originally set up to achieve. Without wanting to make accidental political references, it was unanimously agreed that the key to the ongoing success of the group was in going ‘Back to Basics’ and refocussing on this critical discussion as the primary function of the group.  One suggestion was to have less frequent but longer sessions, possibly meeting for a full day every 6 months; however it was decided that meeting for the same length of time but at only slightly longer intervals would be more practical. As such, we shall be moving to a bimonthly schedule. We hope this will allow those who wish to attend a bit more flexibility in meeting other commitments as well as feeling that they can still be fully active in the group, at the same time as giving everyone a bit more space between meetings to make progress on their projects or develop their practices.

We also plan to be less rigid in formatting any other activities. Whilst we intend to continue supplementing our critical conversation with events such as speakers, topic specific discussions and skills sharing workshops, we will arrange these in a less structured fashion on a month by month basis. The bimonthly move should also make it easier for us to organise things such as gallery visits at times outside of the established meeting pattern. We agreed to stick to the Last Wednesday of the month 7-9pm standard as it was generally felt that there was never going to be a time or day where everyone could be present anyway and there was not a significant bias towards any other specific option in the survey feedback.

We ended the discussion on a positive note and considering there to be ‘no time like the present’ to act on our new convictions, we then spent a bit of time looking at some new developments from those present! James Sharp has been developing an extensive range of distinctive textiles products that he sells at crafts events in and around the Greater Manchester area. He is very responsive to feedback from his customers and has recently developed a leather-bound book to supplement his art journals range.  He brought one of these to show us and we were pleased, but not surprised, to hear that they have been selling well from his stall. These are also available from his online shop.

Given our agreement to adopt a bimonthly format, the October meeting will be skipped and we will next get together in November. We'll also give December (our December meetings tend to be all about the mince pies anyway!) over to more festive engagements and shall then begin a new year of alternate months in January.  The January meeting will be the first in the fourth year of CRITgroup and it is with optimism in relation to our refocused intentions that we look forward to welcoming many new and old friends to our conversations. We hope you will be a part of it!

I have been looking forward to this evening’s meeting for some time now, in fact arguably for as long as CRITgroup has existed, as I have been trying to tempt our speaker along for a good couple of years. I first met Peter S. Smith in 1997 when he taught me as Head of Department at the Kingston College School of Art and Design. In later years it was his guidance and support that gave me my first opportunity to begin my own career as an arts educator but we have since established an ongoing and mutually respectful creative friendship. To say he has been influential in my arts practice and teaching career would be nothing of an understatement.

Peter originally studied painting in Birmingham and discussed how he considered himself to be primarily a painter who had been ‘side tracked’ into printmaking. I found this especially interesting as I had always thought of him as a printmaker who occasionally strayed into painting, though he pointed out that this was probably because he had only just completed his MA in Printmaking at Wimbledon when he was first teaching me. Since retiring from Kingston College he works from a studio at the St Bride Foundation in London and continues to maintain a practice exploring print and paint, as well as embracing digital technology to realise new applications of his traditional skills.

Peter’s accessible style of presentation lent an informal ambience to the group, however this did not undermine his characteristically unassuming intensity, nor betray his passion for his subject. He began by recounting the receipt of a questionnaire that asked him to explain how he felt his work promoted peacekeeping. No doubt the Edinburgh based researcher did not get the clean-cut response he had hoped for when Peter replied that he felt that was rather the wrong question to ask and that sometimes art work is simply trying to understand the world with any causal change being incidental rather than an express aim of the piece. He stated his view that one must guard against discussion becoming the focus, with the work itself reduced to performing an illustrative role to support the verbalisation of the idea.

This drawing 'lay fallow' in the sketchbook for a couple of years before eventual development into a print, the process of which included the creation of a series of secondary drawings before the potentially expensive and certainly time consuming committal to the process of wood cut. Peter recounted various aspects of this fascinating process and I think most of the group were especially impressed to discover that the Albion Press can detect and will respond to the variation in pressure achieved by even a single layer of tissue paper applied to the back of the printing block when required to manipulate the delivery of ink to the surface of the paper.

Peter was clear that in his experience constraints are, somewhat counter intuitively, what give you creative freedom and was very open in discussing his use of tools to navigate various processes. He brought along a small piece