New year, new blog

 

 

For the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about my sketchbook circle progress and have enjoyed it as a means of tracking and documenting the experience. When it faltered a bit as partnerships stumbled, I found myself introducing elements of my other life so, this year, I’m being less puritannically focussed and other stuff will creep in. No apologies.

It’s my fourth year of sketchbook circling: I have come to value it as an integral and liberating part of life, both whimsical and serious, a brilliant way of connecting with other practitioners and stimulating new ideas.

Choosing the sketchbook is a significant December event, ready to work in during January to eventually send to the first of my two partners. I settled upon a spiral bound A5 black book and, for the first time, decided to initiate a theme – just to see what happens, really. In these Brexitacious times, it seems important to use any opportunity to reference anything European for the slimmest of reasons and so, the ‘Carnet de Curiosites’ was born. Collections of bizarre and strange curiosities have always interested me: maybe that’s how the book will evolve.

Details from the first entries:

‘The Welcome Party’ was taken from a photograph I came across from a VE Day – ‘Victory in Europe’ – street party – children, women, cakes and party hats, a strangely surreal scene from the noman’s land of the past. I also began a gorgonish head – which my partner may or may not continue – and created pages of pattern, loosely connected with the idea of curiosities. Meanwhile, that uber-curiosity of a creature, Trump, had ascended to the US presidency and women had marched in their thousands to protest at his mysogynist, racist and fascist attitudes. I had to reference it.

That done, the book was posted to Ellie, partner A, and, bang on schedule, I received the next book from Sara, partner B, at the beginning of February.

I’ve been exploring my practise in other ways, too; having joined a local painting group,now that I’m in my dotage and merrily retired. The group exhibits a couple of times a year – something of a scarey notion for me. I’ve never really worked to sell, apart from a period of freelancing when the children were small, and other odds and sods along the way. I’m very, very poor at finishing work, having been always far more interested in the process than the product, so the thought of getting some pieces together for exhibition is a challenge I havent met for decades. Anyway, it’s forcing me to work in a quite new way. Given that I’m still not sure what my style is, if indeed I have one, everything’s an experiment. These are pieces currently under construction:

 

Yes, deeply boring, I know. Except the portrait of Metal Mickey from down the road that I’m quite pleased with. This is the trouble with commerce. And trying to please. It’s never entirely a good idea.

 

May Day…..

…… a day to celebrate.

I love May, partly because its my birthday month. When I was a child, I thought I was soooo lucky to have a May birthday. It was clearly the best month ever, what with the lillies of the valley out in my Nana’s garden, the peonies budding up to beautiful waxy squashiness in ours, and the chance to wear the starched white dress, white buckskin sandals and Spanish lace mantilla that were the uniform garb of little Catholic girls in May Processions, celebrating the month of Our Lady. I’m a recovering Catholic of long standing but even now, there’s a sort of fluffy, light and hazy cast to the memory and I wonder if it’s too far a connection to link my pride in having a link to the Marian month with later (rabid, some would say) feminism. Women weren’t celebrated for the right reasons generally, in the 60s, so you took your gender pride where you could find it. You still have to, really.

The manilla sketchbook came back to me from Sara a month ago. Her work included an Orwellian eye above a crowd of people morphing into similar eye shapes.

Clever idea. The following pages show experimental use of plastic vegetable nets, melted onto pages creating texture and pattern. Sara had also worked into some of the black and white drawings with coloured gelpens and thread interventions. It is becoming a texturally interesting sketchbook.

I wanted to try to respond with textile techniques – I attached a piece of open weave bandage and  (crudely) embroidered holes and patterns, I used gel pens like Sara’s to complement her additions. A number of pages were showing an interest in weave, thread and irregular grid patterns. This led me to a pattern, quite maplike; the linear netting reminded me of holey skanky nylon and that took me to the fishnet stocking and stilleto heel – never quite sure what I feel about the old dominatrix shoes but …. each to their own, and they do form a lovely line.

Back to the eye and, again, the suggestion of dystopia with rose tinted glasses. Finally, i played with grids, negative space, regularity, missing shapes, echoes of shapes, order, disorder …. perhaps we’re moving towards chaos.

The book’s in the post now as I await the return of the other one. Exhibitions are over – a learning experience – and I mostly finished the painting below today. An exercise in colour, she is based upon the Welsh mythological woman, Blodeuwedd, bringer of spring and made of flowers, sometimes manifest as an owl. I don’t know anything, really, about Welsh mythology, but came upon references to the story when I was young, initially through Alan Garner’s, ‘The Owl Service’. I’ve imagined her for a long time.

[Br]’Exeunt, pursued by bear’

For ‘bear’, read ‘chaos and rampant Capitalist corruption’: today is Brexit day. Optimistically, I thought it would never come, but the loonies are running the asylum in the mistaken belief it’s Downton Abbey and there are bounders at the haha. I’m quite surprised there haven’t been more memes featuring the word, ‘exeunt’; its rhyming possibilities are attractive.  Enough of that – I’ve given it far too much thought and emotion instead of writing blogs and documenting my sketchbook work.

I’ve been lazy and it’s a fair old time since I wrote anything, so now I have to wrack my memory for sense.

Aeons ago, in February, I worked on my partner ‘B’s sketchbook and the documentary evidence is somewhere amongst my photostream’s 28,886 images. It is surprisingly easy to find them, however.

The manilla A5 sketchbook had been started by Sara with enquiring and playful mixed media with collage, stitching, pattern and texture suggesting responses.

My first entries were prompted by texture and pattern using a media combination I’m particularly fond of: white posca pen and black ink:

These doodles gave way to further explorations of media and subject – webs, blocks, linear connections – a 1960’s-style geometric thread  construction came from spider web design. I looked at Ernst Haekel and transcribed a drawing of plant cells into a structure pattern.

I knew that my partner is a textile artist which led me to think of ways I could use fabric or yarn and the obvious development was to weave – with paper, thread, plastic and ribbon,

And finally, I returned to an earlier stage in the book, referencing Orwell’s ‘1984’ on the page which Sara had included the text, ‘Books’. Dystopia, mess, muddle: seems appropriate.

I could have done so much more but there’s a time to limit input if I’m to avoid the danger of the experience being less shared than dominated (by moi).

March saw my original sketchbook being returned by Ellie, partner B, after her work had been made.

My additions:

 

The first addition was easy – I filled most of the gallery-style spaces that Ellie had created on a double page spread with textures, cigarette cards and shapes, leaving some to be finished later.

Ellie had introduced in-fill patterns to this concertina page; I went with that.

Ellie’s gelli print (right) reminded me of standing stones. I carved monolith-like shapes from an eraser and printed in response.

The standing stones and cutting activities continued into a paper cut of a tree with a Henge in the background. I used the tree as a stencil, too, on a later page and made more paper cutting of natural forms.

And that is where I stopped, again resisting the temptation to overdo it.

Meanwhile, I have continued to prepare for the local exhibition with mounting trepidation. I have six box canvases, a few intaglio prints and a couple of unframed mounted works on paper. Oh, the angst over pricing! And ….. is this what I want to do? I don’t know; I feel a lot less precious about selling than I used to. The bald facts of the matter are that artists, of whatever ability or hue, need to make a living and, to an extent, that means working with what people want to buy in order to fund personal development and experiment.  To balance things, I’ve booked myself on a painting and printing holiday in North Devon, in June.  It won’t be lovely Yorkshire or Northumbrian vistas but I can live with Devon and the opportunity to explore landscape: total indulgence!