June is usually the month when North Yorkshire Open Studios (NYOS) invites the public into around 100 artist’s studios around North Yorkshire.

This year the pandemic has curtailed many artists’ plans - but not for Bridget Tempest who has again organised an event in her own home near Carleton.

EVERY two years, artist, printmaker and filmmaker Bridget Tempest invites a small group of exceptional artists from the Craven area to participate in an ‘open studio’ event in her house and studio, Rushbank, high on the moor above Carleton, and this year is no different.

Despite the difficulties thrown up by the virus, Bridget has been determined to go ahead. A full risk assessment has been undertaken and six artists will be at the house between June 12 and 20 with collections of their work.

Each of the participating artists uses drawing as a major part of their art practice, and so we are offering a special series of artist-led workshops during the week based on drawing. Experiencing the studios is a chance to really appreciate the creative process, from initial inspiration to completed work, and to meet and get to know the artists. Pieces will be available for sale from all six artists: Bridget Tempest from Carleton, Anna Lambert and David AP Thomas from Cross Hills, Joan and Chris Murray from Skipton and Jacquie Denby from Grassington.

The exhibition will be open from 10am – 5pm. Find them by following the yellow signs from Carleton.

Jacquie Denby’s paintings and drawings are a response to the Dales landscape she lives in, and also to the urge to make something. David Thomas’s oil paintings are closely observed still-lifes; arrangements of things both found and made; pots and bits of stuff that have caught his eye, sometimes flowers. Simple objects in a recognisable space, formalist in conception, these still-life paintings seem almost habitable, architectural.

Anna Lambert’s hand-built ceramics are exhibited internationally, and she is currently working towards a solo exhibition in London. Each piece is individual, slab built and painted with coloured slips using her drawings of woodlands, orchards and fields as a starting point. Bridget uses printmaking processes to make mixed media works on paper. Slowly drawn copper plates are the basis of varied evocations of a specific landscape and its imaginary future. For the material object of the print, marks are composed in space. Film, ephemeral, is light composed in time. The experience of landscape reaches many levels: visual, haptic, memory, movement and time.

Joan Murray’s long experience with a wide range of patterns, textures, colours, silhouettes and yarns means that many decisions are made by instinct She continues to knit, and is weaving again. This is slower and more contemplative, but equally experimental and just as painterly. She knits, weaves, draws, collages, mono-prints, paints and takes photographs. As fashion and textiles tutor at Craven College she encourages all students to gather and store the visual information all around them.

Chris Murray works in a variety of media including watercolour, oil paint and print. He is interested in the discoveries he can make of colour as he uses it in the depiction of form and space of the subjects of his choice; recently this has been of the town in which he lives, the countryside around it and of still life subjects he happens upon around his home. He works directly in front of his subjects or in his studio from drawings made in front of his subjects.

Follow the signs from Carleton village off West Road/Carleton Lane. Examples of work can be seen on the Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/rushbankopenstudio/