Still Life.
Whitelands Farm then…seems to be going so slow. Finished a mouse and struggled with the corn, kept changing my mind on how to make corn and in the end settled for each grain being made of four tiles instead of two. Once a system is in place then things speed right up and progress is quicker. Doing fields at the moment and again a colour system is needed for each area.
It’s not like paint I can’t just add a bit of yellow to get the right colour. It’s all about mixing colours optically on the paper to achieve an overall effect …….a blend from a distance….can be really tricky.
While I was doing the farm buildings and the edges of the fields in this mosaic I remembered seeing several public footpath signs leading across fields and several farms between where I live and the woodlands a couple of miles away. So I have this morning I spent a couple of hours or more traversing these public footpaths on my bike around these farms. Every time I saw footpath sign I went along it. There turned out to be so many different paths I didn’t even reach the woods. The signs for these paths sometimes just disappear leaving you to ride where you think it might be!….Found myself riding through sheep, horses, horse jumps, past rusty machinery cows and lifted my bike over countless gates, just totally lost in muddy farms for ages and ages. And never once was accosted for trespassing, which I felt was amazing. I did see one bloke carrying a plastic bag walking towards me and wondered if he was going to shout ‘ GET OFF MY LAND’. As I passed him it turned out he was carrying a muddy car battery in the other hand and said ‘Morning’ quite friendly.
So I got a feel for fields surrounding farms alright which is what my next mosaic task is!
And I would also like to say that I heard Grayson Perry mention on the radio the other day that ‘pottery’ played second fiddle to other art forms, which was one of the reasons that drew him to pottery and made him want to work in that medium. Well…….I used to paint ‘still lifes’ when I was at school and loved doing them, really loved them, choosing the objects and arranging them and everything, even a view out of the window in the background, lost in a world of things I liked. But when I went to collage I was made to feel this was an inferior way of working, and what I really aught to be doing was some proper macho, expressionist, action paintings about plasticity and get to grips with proper painting issues….even epic history painting was better than STILL LIFE.…move on. Unlike Grayson Perry I believed this advise to be true and left still life alone ….
I shall be in Amsterdam for a few days on holiday next week and might re-acquaint my relationship with the ‘still life’ after all these years apart.
