For the eighth year the Deepbridge Chester Arts Fair took place at Chester Racecourse from 15 – 17 November. I obtained a discounted student ticket via Eventbrite; it is in my annual calendar.
Collections on display included paintings, sculpture, photography, ceramics and digital art, with works for sale ranging in price from £40 to £10,000. Alongside the exhibitors there was also a number of talks and demonstrations and I also visited the University of Chester Art and Design department on stand number 84.
I was drawn to a number of artists but especially two, whose practices were poles apart; Heidi Koenig www.heidikoenig.co.uk who gave generously of her time to discuss the use of oil paints in her abstract landscapes and Jai Sol www.jaisolart.com whose digital work is very far from my own analogue collage.
Jai very kindly spent a lot of time talking with me and allowed me to photograph one particular piece, “Pop Queen” which I found intriguing. This limited edition fine art print features the postage stamp image of the Queens head, subtitled “Surely there is more to the queen than the image that is stamped in our mind”, the fifty five heads are each given a pop art treatment and altered, not beyond recognition, to include characters such as Warhol, Pacman and Snoopy.
This isn’t the biggest art fair in the region but it is the most local, it didn’t disappoint .....if only I had a bigger home and an even bigger budget!
