Jake Lever
Angel Hand - print for Ukraine
As a small gesture I am joining with other artists via artistssupportpledge.com to help the people of Ukraine during this time of crisis. Throughout March I have been selling limited edition images of ‘Angel Hand’, printed A4 size as giclee prints onto Hannemuehle Photo Rag 188 gsm archive quality paper. Each print is numbered out of 50 and signed and cost £50.00 with free shipping. All profits from sales go to the Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund. To date Artists Support Pledge has raised over £100,000 for Ukraine Support Pledge. ‘Angel Hand’ prints are still available to purchase from our Lever Arts Shop. This image was made some years ago as part of a series of angels’ hands called ‘Watchers and Holy Ones’. Printed as a collograph, the distressed lines and marks within the original print speak of a struggle and pain, as well as witness, as the all seeing eyes stare into the darkness. As I watched helplessly the horrific crisis unfold in Ukraine, this image came to mind during my reflections.
Gillian Lever
Peace of Wild Things
Becky Morse-Brown (Art Therapist) and I are enjoying preparing a Creative Quiet Day inspired by Wendell Berry’s poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ to be held at The Woodbrooke Centre, Birmingham on Friday May 6th.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
‘The Peace of Wild Things’ is a beautiful poem of courage, healing and hope. The day will include a short introduction to the life and work of Wendell Berry (American poet, environmental activist and farmer). There will be opportunities to work in silence, along with time to rest in the wonderfully restorative grounds at The Woodbrooke Centre, which has a walled garden, labyrinth and lake.
The day is now fully booked but if you would like to be updated on future Creative Quiet Days please contact Lever Arts.
Jake Lever
‘Connected by a Thread’
This month I am preparing to exhibit a large Cyanoptype that I made during the Pandemic at St Andrew’s Church, Shifnal. It will be the first time that the piece has been seen publicly as I made it at a time when communal spaces were off limits. Chris Thorpe, the vicar there, plans to use the piece during the Good Friday Liturgy.
During the first lockdown I went on daily afternoon walks to Highbury Park near my home in Kings Heath, south Birmingham. Life felt unsettled, destabalised, strange and weird. Normal reference points - the routine of work, the company of friends, trips to the shops were stripped away and I felt vulnerable and reflective. In the words of the musician Nick Cave, written at the start of the first lockdown, ‘Our sudden dislocation has thrown us into a mystery that exists at the edge of tears and revelation, for none of us knows what tomorrow will bring.’
Like many, I found a sense of grounding and reorientation in the immense beauty of the natural world around me. The park which I explored daily had once been part of the estate of Highbury Hall, the Victorian ‘country’ residence of Joseph Chamberlain the politician and Mayor of Birmingham. In a corner of the park a large Southern Magnolia tree shed large, generous leaves that decayed very slowly, rotting down into a gauze of fine veins. These leaves spoke to me of the intense beauty of life, alongside its fragility. Not knowing why, I started to collect them on my walks and soon had hundreds of these delicate, gossamer-thin skeletal leaves.
Later that summer I started creating ‘blueprints’, or cyanotypes, an early photographic process first used by Victorian botanists such as Anna Atkins to record plants. I placed the leaves on to light sensitive paper and exposed them to the sun, creating a photographic impression of the leaves in negative - the veins appearing while out of a deep blue. For this 3 metre high piece I connected the leaves by their central veins and, after experimentation, a simple vertical line of them felt like the right composition. Many of the leaves are hanging upside down, reminiscent of beads of dripping tears. Their delicate latticework of tiny veins also recall the bronchial trees of human lungs. Here is breath struggling, leaves/lungs broken, damaged, half-there….the faltering breath of life.
There is strength in this image too. The connected leaves in negative are, for me, suggestive of the interconnectedness of all life in all its precariousness and fragility. Here is a kind of core, a spine of connected vertebrae, something raw and essential enduring after certainties have been stripped away.
‘Connected by a Thread’ detail
Cyanotype on 410gsm Somerset velvet paper
July 2020
Gillian Lever
Spring Commission
In recent weeks I have been developing colour studies for a new commission. I will be soon be ready to move on to larger canvases. I am enjoying the gradually lengthening days and increased light levels.
My client loves the colour orange and I have been taking colour references from Strelizia, the glorious South African Bird of Paradise flower.
Gillian Lever
Birmingham and Sandwell Different Strokes
For several years Lever Arts have been working with Birmingham and Sandwell Different Strokes. Different Strokes champions peer support for younger stroke survivors and supports members in achieving an active recovery throughout their lives. During the Pandemic the network has been, and is, vital in providing a lifeline to stroke survivors living in the City. COVID has meant that people living with stroke have been more isolated than ever before. Over the past two years it has often been very difficult for people to access the therapy services that they need, it has also been challenging for stroke survivors to socialise and develop supportive relationships.
In January Lever Arts worked with Birmingham and Sandwell Different Strokes to submit a funding proposal to facilitate more family art workshops, something that we have partnered on previously. We are hopeful that more art sessions will be able to take place this year.
Jake Lever
Wake Up - Preparing for Greenbelt 2022
Lever Arts is looking forward to Greenbelt Festival . Over the August Bank Holiday weekend (26th - 29th August) Greenbelt will host a multi-arts festival programme of music, visual and performing arts, spirituality, comedy, talks and discussion. Greenbelt is committed to the arts, faith and justice and to its underlying values of tolerance, dialogue and hope.
Lever Arts is part of Sew Far Sew Good - a family art collective. We work with brother-in-law and artist Phill Hopkins and sister-in-law Susie Hopkins (a primary teacher with a special interest in art and the imaginative nurturing of children’s spiritual lives) to devise art workshops for the Children and Family programme at Greenbelt.
We are excited by this year’s ‘Wake Up’ theme and by the prospect of returning to the Festival at beautiful Boughton House.
