FIVE hours in the studio today!
Admittedly one of those was spent re-stacking my wood pile and all the boards that got wet recently. The driving rain got in under the door and soaked into my precious pile of boards that I scavenged from the college I taught at before I moved up to Yorkshire. However, my landlord has sorted the problem out and I can now shut the door without breaking my arm. I stacked everything up on bricks/blocks of wood and used old RAW Directories as spacers to allow the air to get between so everything has a better chance of drying out.
The rest of my day was spent working on the collagraph blocks I started last week. Simple techniques of glueing and sticking allowed me to “feel” my way back into working in the studio. I am planning to make some artists’ books as well as prints; whether I edition them or just make one offs, I have yet to decide. In between cutting out the grey board bases (Old sketch book backs) and referring to one of my favourite books on creative bookbinding, I scribbled down ideas in a note book. As ideas start to flow, I need to jot them down in both short hand visual form and brief explanations otherwise I tend to forget some. That way, once I start to make some up into actual pieces, I will be more likely to select the best outcomes. . . That’s the theory anyway.
I finally got round to writing about the RAW trip to MIMA to meet William Tillyer, who showed us round his retrospective: www.suegough.blogspot.co.uk
I have yet to finalise transportation of my big painting to Manchester so that is a priority for this week.
Oh! How I wish being an artist just meant working in my studio every day!
