Hurrah! I’ve downloaded the logo and created the bank account. Online and hard copy forms have been sent. We’re official and our work can begin. Thank you Arts Council England!
I’m debating setting up a separate blog here on a-n for the project, but with three blogs in existence already – one of which is for the Artist’s Eye project on WordPress (so that my non-artist partners could post) it might be a bridge too far. Yet so much is happening in the studio that I’m burning to share it right here. This space is different from WordPress.
In turning this conundrum over in my mind I’ve come to see a-n blogging as a most precious conversation with a more specialised readership. I can write about my process without fear of sounding bonkers or frankly boring a wider readership.
The studio process is perhaps unique – I turn up for work and seal myself in. Preferably I speak to no-one and the hours are consumed as quickly as the bagel I gobble down between washing my brushes. Off duty, my thoughts are with the latest developments, and also the myriad non-studio tasks required to manage the project and make it happen.
I knew that this project would push me into new areas in my work. I planned to respond to Felicia Browne’s drawings by adopting graphite and charcoal into my practice, but thought this would lead to abstraction of line, which it still might.
Currently I’m working on six painted sketches. My poet collaborator and I are attempting to conjure six scenes in Felicia’s life, six vignettes (perhaps) of her short life plotting her trajectory from her birth in Surrey to her death in Spain.
The surprise has been the urge to reach Felicia through a reinterpretation of her sketches. With my hand I trace the movement of her hand. With my eye I try to capture the scenes she saw, examine the faces that fascinated her, the details she caught. I try to speak her language.
This I marry with my brush, my lexicon of line and wedge. My insistence on texture and layer. This is my language.
Something about this process feels like channelling. Is it foolish to imagine this as conversation? One friend I described my process to remarked that it sounded “like a tactile seance.” I guess it does.
Through this process I’m arriving at something new and unfamiliar. This is work I don’t fully recognise. But these are sketches – to be shown as process work at my studios for peer evalution. I’ve yet to discover what will occur when I move up scale and work on the final pieces for exhibition in the place of Felicia’s birth.
This is a detail from “Scullion with a Red Wedge.” Using both Felicia’s sketch and material from one of her letters to arrive at this composition.
