Art From London Markets, a-n feature

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So the start of the new year is both a time for trying new things and looking back, so this week I have had a try for the first time at water gilding, which has been a challenge, and even though I made an attempt at limiting the areas with potential for mistakes by buying some ready made bits the challenge was big and the mistakes were many…. I chose some lovely figs in the mistaken impression that I might end up with a finished piece.

 

I applied the first layer of bol, completing the first layer of bol I wondered about the consistency I had used, as I have not been able to find definitive ratios for the mix.  Completing the second layer I was a bit concerned about how uneven it was, by the third and fourth layers it was decidedly lumpy.  My bol and glue mix…is the problem here or the brush or the person weilding them???  Waiting for the bol to dry, then burnshing the bol with a jade burnisher, it is possible to see the shiny burnished areas, but perhaps I should have atmpted to get a flatter finish in the first place: shiny=burnished, but alot more work and pressure may have avoided later problems. The gold leaf was applied in very small pieces as suggested every where I looked.  Brushing it down, all the areas where the gold had not stuck to the clay and where it suck where I did not want it are revealed, hmmmm, so getting control of the very runny liquid might need some little drains in the form of grooves in the surface….so I revisited and applied a different colour leaf so that the patching up would be revealed in the end.  The process of burnishing revealed new areas that were not fully stuck and where the patching had occured leakage of the liquid into other areas made for areas that would not come up shiny as they were water marked.

So I made a second attempt on a clay board, first applying leaf directly to the clay board, using the water/glue/vodka mix, the less absorbent nature of the surface mean that areas that actually took were  unpredictable however the finish once burnished was lovely and flat and mirror like.  I also experimented with using a thicker bol mix.

But watch out for those dangerous bumps and lumps

So that is the new thing I am trying to learn, and the review is the look back at the markets I visited last year and some thoughts about them: they can be seen at the artfromlondonmarkets.blogspot.com

 

WEDNESDAY, 6 JANUARY 2016
Going to Walthamstow on the first sunday after New Year in the pouring rain was a mistake.

So at the start of this New Year I am thinking about risk, mistakes, learning and new beginnings. Tommorow I am stuck at home so it is a good day for trying something new, time consumimng and time sensitive, which requires the use of a cooker.

New Year, new technique: I am finally going to have a go at water gilding: my glue is soaking to be cooked up in a bain marie tomorrow, strained and then mixed with the bol, I have a pre blended bol to make life easier for me as a beginner. The bol will be applied to the area I want to gild on a gesso board. I also have a pregessoed board. Let the errors begin.

And here’s the thing, I have taken away some of the potential mistakes to make the areas for mistakes more limited and therefore more examinable.

My New Year Resolution involves a new note book, always a happy moment. I have been using this blog as a sketch book, dotting down all potential ideas, and then…..sometimes not noting them, when I feel they are too ill thought through, and I realised at the start of this year that I need to be a bit more organised in keeping those less well made plans documented. I have had a whole field of scraps of paper and various notebooks full of everything (including domestic stuff and things related to other work).

Then yesterday as I had a big chat with my youngest daughter about the need to become more orgainsed now she is at secondary school I realised that I could do with following my own advice a long time out of the other side of secondary school. So the notebook: a place to record the semi formed ideas, too ill formed even to make it onto here (and some pretty raw ones do make their way onto here).

My practice tends to take the form of occasional storms of ideas and inspiration, that need settling, researching and developing or rejecting and sometimes just need a little space and time to mature before I return to them, then an untangling where a direction that is worth pursuing emerges; then the following of that direction, with a few falters, turns and diversions, often taking me to a quite unexpected destination. Sometimes directions I have not pursued are worth revisiting, and sometimes sharing a potential idea too early almost feels like a jinx, or makes me feel too worried about it not working out. But ideas and atempts that do not work out are actually the most valuable ones in order to make the journey.

ideas forming
not yet informed
or readable
by anyone else
f
a
l
li
n
g

and
failing and
muddled and
unpracticed
needing a little
quiet space alone

(And if you are thinking Walthamstow is a strange place to be inspired into poetry check out @michaelshann1 ‘s new book. Even the shop names are poetry here in the right hands.)

So my NY resolution is to get a single ideas book to record these ideas early on, and to do a bit of filtering before they get shared with you, and most importantly keep them in a single place. There are times when scrapes and accidents need a bit of polite privacy before they get any publicity .

So the documentation of this project which currently includes pieces of paper, notebooks that contain alot of other things too, note book that includes details of story collecting plus other stuff, paintings, drawings, prints this blog and the website and a folder of bits. It will be refined down to:

1. Ideas book
2.Market notes note book including shopping lists
3. Story collecting note book
4. Sketch book and loose sheets of paper for drawing
5. Blog
6. Website
7. Painting prints
8. Products (exhibitions/publications etc)

The note books will be dedicated to art work only and inevitably I will have another note book which is a general life one. My partner will proabably just see this all as an excuse for some January sale stationary purchases, and will wonder why I can’t do it all on a smart phone like him. (Remember the lost stories…..)

The shop
Rainy Sunday at the start of the year, our second attempt to visit Walthamstow Farmers market was met with just a little more success than last time, when there were no stalls at all. This time there were 5. The guy on the main veg stall that was there said that most people didn’t turn up because it was just after Christmas. But then you have to ask yourself the question, why advertise it as open. It is quite a treck for us, difficult to park as most of the streets are parking restricted, we had checked on line and the markets own website advertised it was on, so it was very dissappointing. We bought some “biodynamic” betroot and leeks (£4.20), though I am going to have to find out what that means, a new one on me, (according to google it has something to do with Rudolf Steiner) honey from a local supplier(£7), half a leg of lamb (£12) from the stall selling pricey meat and the following from the informative veg man: kale purple and green, rosemary bunch, mixed colour small carrots, 4 bunch days and tulips, purple sprouts, large celeriac, large asian pumpkin, oak leaf lettuce, spring onions bunch, 12 shallots, new potatoes 1 lb (£25) total:£48

A lot of money spent in a short time and no time to set up contacts for story collecting.

So to go with the lovely story of the “leaf come tree fruit” I have been working on some pomegranate images……

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This is the story of a migration, of a child growing up in the sun and ochres and vibrant colours of Tunisia and of coming to London. Of the beginning of the adult who pays attention to the small and beautiful things around her, of someone with a visual sensibility apparent in childhood and not lost.

Sadly the recording of her words is lost but the sense of the story is not.

She told me of holding her mothers hand, a small girl in a grey London street, catching sight at eye level of the pomegranates on the stall outside the shops as her mother hurried past, and how they evoked the sunshine and colours of her life before they came here.

“We lived in Tunisia until I was about 4. While we were there my mum grew all sorts in the garden, including a pomegranate tree. I was very excited to see it finally sprouting and shouted ‘leaf come, leaf come’ – and ever since my family have called pomegranates ‘leaf come’ tree fruit”

 She talked about how pomegranates have the quality of hidden treasure, the outside like a clay vessel, the inside a tumble of jewels.

This is not the story of a Syrian refugee, or any kind of refugee, just the story remembered of a child who has been moved from one country to another by her family and in a small way how that early experience shaped her adult self.

Yet right now there are people fleeing Syria in panic at the terrible conditions of civil war.  I once met an Iranian woman and her husband who had got out of Iran just before the revolution, and her husband described her as heart broken by the loss of the landscape.  It needs to be  remembered that while the people coming from Syria now are escaping something awful, life threatening, dangerous and chaotic, most of them would have had normal lives before this turmoil.  That within the relief of reaching somewhere safe, for those lucky enough to have got to safety, we should pay respect to the grief they will have for all that they have lost.

And that is not the only emigration /immigration there is or has been from and to this region: There are the large numbers of British families working in places like Dubai and across North Africa and the Middle East, our own economic emigrants making a “better life” for themselves.  There always have been the diplomatic corps, and the adventurers like my friends from college who worked in a schools.  So how is it that we are free to live pretty much where ever we want, but resentful enough as a society for our body politic to feel the need to limit the help we offer to such an extent?

 

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Party preparations for our big party at the weekend included a big print making session, competing 80 varied coloured prints from one set of blocks out of an edition of 100. I will complete the edition this week, they were all hand finished, and 20 are available to buy, the rest have gone to new homes already.

Remember to peep at the website www.artfromlondonmarkets.com prints are available through the site

 

 

He told me the story of hiding from his father in his bedroom. He told me of the fear he felt when he heard the bee come into the flat attracted by the fish his father was frying, unexpected as there were insect nets at the windows, and as a small boy how scared he was of insects. That he kept himself tucked away, but could hear the buzzing from the next room.

He told me how his fear gradually changed as he heard his father trying to kill the bee and protect the fish from the cat that had been lurking all morning ready to pounce. How his urge to laugh got stonger as the bangs and crashes from the kitchen and his father’s sweary shouts got louder. And how with his door closed his fear did turn to laughter as he imagined what was happening in the room next door.