Thursday morning was spent getting some good sound recordings, in particular an explanation of Structure 8 for the visitors’ tour. His voice is loud and clear and the information is gold.
There are also some good background voices of work in the trench alongside. Both drawings are rather tentative as I was anxious to avoid recording the noise of my pencil on the sketchbook.
Later I ventured into Trench J to record more mixed voices of work in progress to use as background.
The rest of the day was spent talking to archaeologists with various skills and knowledge of the databases used to document the site – with the hope of finding a way to integrate my artwork into the site record. Eventually I realised this is a far more complicated process than I can manage at present – and therefore felt rather lost and confused.
So I relaxed with drawing an archaeological still life for no other reason than it appealed visually.
On Friday morning I had a long talk with a friend, which sorted out my priorities (concentrate on Structure 8) and allayed my concerns about integration into the site record. However once again, the weather was making art problematical by constantly changing from sun to high wind to rain, with typical Orkadian speed. So I took shelter in the Finds Hut and drew some heads. It was impossible to draw more than heads as they were all moving as fast as the weather.
Back outside to work on Structure 8 and to revisit the views of previous paintings.
But my taste for drawing people took over
and the result was one of my best watercolours to date.
Perhaps it would be worth spending my last two days on site next week collecting more figures to layer into the next ‘film’ project…
