Rye - Paintings & fine art giclee prints
Colin Bailey is a UK artist and printmaker living and working in Hastings, East Sussex after living in Rye for ten years and Kings Cross, London for fifteen years.
A fine art oil painter and master etcher with a love of traditional painting and printmaking methods, techniques and skills, and with a printmaker's instinct for multiple images, Colin also utilises modern fine art technology and uses digital photography to capture pictures, views images and scenes that he translates into iconic paintings and etchings of the local area. Whilst using fine art giclee printing to reproduce his original paintings as limited edition fine art prints, Colin also continues to print the hand pulled etchings for which he was originally best known.
As a popular Rye artist Colin Bailey realised the wider appeal of this small picturesque area of the UK’s south east coast and established the Ryepress site in 2000 as an online portfolio to exhibit his Rye and St Pancras station limited edition etchings for sale to a wider audience than the UK. Now living in Hastings, and established as a Hastings artist he reproduces many of his new oil and acrylic paintings as fine art limited edition giclee prints, whilst continuing to explore and develop the tonal possibilities of etchings on copper plate.
LIMITED EDITION FINE ART PRINTS BY COLIN BAILEY
Etchings, paintings, drawings and giclee prints by artist printmaker Colin Bailey
Etchings, paintings, drawings and giclee prints by artist printmaker Colin Bailey
COLIN BAILEY
ARTIST & PRINTMAKER
Limited edition prints.
Original etchings, paintings
and reproduction giclee prints
Original etchings, paintings
and reproduction giclee prints
Rye -Paintings & fine art giclee prints
Kings Cross Skyline 1 - Limited edition fine art etching
ABSTRACT ETCHINGS
Weapons of Mass Construction (the etching above) is the first of a new series of limited edition etchings exploring a complex range of ideas that encompass science, philosophy and possibly even politics and plays fast and loose with preconceptions of scale and perspective, order and chaos and accident and design.
Essentially abstract and yet intricately mapped, these contemporary etchings are the result of editing and distilling the best parts of larger, more spontaneous oil paintings and drawings.
Essentially abstract and yet intricately mapped, these contemporary etchings are the result of editing and distilling the best parts of larger, more spontaneous oil paintings and drawings.
WHAT ARE ETCHINGS?
Etching is one of the oldest and most satisfying forms of printmaking and in the hands of a expert can deliver intricacies of line and tone unrivalled by any other fine art printing process.
Etchings are the prints produced by etching an image on a copper or zinc plate, using acid, filling the textures of the image with ink and then printing it on to paper by running it through a heavy etching press.
Hastings - Limited edition etchings
Rye - Limited edition etchings
Hastings Old Town, East Sussex Hastings is best known for its connection with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 which actually occurred north of the town at Senlac Hill in Battle. Hastings was one of the Cinque ports, It still has the largest beach based fishing fleet in England.
Rye is a small hill top town in East Sussex, UK, on the River Rother, and at the western edge of Romney Marsh. Notable buildings in the town include St Mary's church, the Ypres Tower , Lamb House, The Mermaid Inn and Mermaid Street, Watchbell Street, and Church Square.
Hastings - Paintings & fine art giclee prints
RYE AND HASTINGS GICLEE PRINTS AND ETCHINGS
Fallen Angel - Paintings & giclee
Figure - Drawings & giclee
Groynes - Paintings & giclee
Figure - Etchings
Two new paintings and limited edition giclee prints of Hastings: East Hill Sun, the companion to East Hill Snow, and Vanilla Sky, a dilapidated fishing boat on Hastings beach set against a stormy sky.
Hastings - EAST HILL SUN
Hastings - VANILLA SKY
FEATURED NEW WORK by Colin Bailey
WHAT IS A LIMITED EDITION PRINT?
The terms Limited Edition Print, Original Print, and Reproduction Print are often confusing. Printing has always been associated with the mass production of the written word or image and so the phrase original print seems a contradiction in terms.
Printmaking as a form of fine art has become distinctly separate from printing as the process of reproducing multiple images.
Printmaker is the term used to describe an artist who works directly with the medium that will be printed from; as opposed to reproducing an image created in another medium.
RX Fishing Boats - Limited edition giclee prints
Colin Bailey exhibits frequently in various art exhibitions and with art groups in Rye, Hastings, Tenterden, East Sussex and the rest of the UK.
Ryepress is also now a fine art gallery and original print studio in the centre of Hastings old town. Situated next to the well known Retro shop in Hastings High street, the Ryepress etching Studio and fine art gallery joins a growing collection of art galleries in Hastings including the Jerwood Gallery. The Gallery exhibits all of Colin's limited edition original etchings, reproduction fine art giclee prints, original oil and acrylic paintings as well as giclee printed greeting cards of his recent paintings exclusive to the Ryepress art gallery.
With the eponymous Rye press now snugly installed in the rear of the art gallery, the original print studio also features ad-hoc etching demonstrations. Questions about printmaking methods and techniques are encouraged and visitors are offered a unique opportunity to see the etching process in action, preview proof prints of the various stages of each new etching and handle the original etched copper plates. See What is an etching? for a detailed explanation of the etching process and etching techniques and methods.
Beyond the traditional views and scenes of Rye & Hastings, Colin has created a portfolio of more experimental and almost abstract oil paintings exploring the weather beaten coastal textures and structures of Rye Bay (the East Sussex coast between Hastings and Dungeness), and a series of figure paintings, etchings and drawings.
ABSTRACT OR NON-REPRESENTATIONAL PAINTINGS
The latest addition to Ryepress is a small group of abstract or non-figurative / non representational paintings - the result of some earlier experiments with the shapes and marks of the coastal textures paintings. Just before Christmas I carried on working with these ideas as drawings which I hope to use as the basis for etchings in the future. Whilst I am best known for the paintings of Rye and Hastings I was mainly an abstract painter in my youth. The figure paintings,etching and drawings below have rekindled an experimental approach to composition, colour and tone that I have decided to follow further.
Recently I have been working on a dictionary or glossary of printmaking terms which I hope to include soon on my information site Limited edition prints
Colin Bailey April 2013
These items, available from Amazon are some of those I have personally owned and can recommend. Around Rye in Old Photographs is one of the first books I bought when moving to Rye and almost every house in Rye has a copy - as almost every house in Rye is in it!
An Ordinance Survey map is essential for any visit to Rye - walk 15 minutes in any direction and you will be on a footpath and fields full of sheep.
Anyone familiar with the Mapp and Lucia books by EH Benson (who lived in the town) will know that “Tilling” is actually Rye! This set of DVDs with Prunella Scales, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne was filmed in Rye and features many local landmarks
When it comes to preparing canvases for painting I tend to stick to traditional methods as laid out in the Renaissance by Cennino d'Andrea Cennini - The Craftsman's Handbook, (Il libro dell'arte)
When it comes to preparing canvases for painting I tend to stick to traditional methods as laid out in the Renaissance by Cennino d'Andrea Cennini -
RECOMMENDED ART, HASTINGS AND RYE RELATED ITEMS
Ryepress resources is an Amazon “Astore” in which I have gathered together in one place some of the Art Materials and equipment that I have used and can therefore recommend.