So Chinese New Year starts on 5 Feb and I’ve decided to make that the start to my own New Year. Summing up 2018, I’ve moved more into artists’ filmmaking and further consolidated my work thematically.
The plan this year is to watch more artists’ films, up my production values, get into a festival….. and upskill my physical printmaking skills as I need the balance between digital and physical.
One’s own zodiac sign is traditionally not a good year but let’s hope I put in place opportunities for the future, however short that may be, and in the meantime fully be in the present.
So I didn’t get the DYCP grant as other applications were preferred. The silver lining is that I am not under pressure to deliver a project … although the work I wanted to do for the project is work I am going to do anyway somehow. Ideas are developing as I write.
There are a few things on the horizon and I’m still cutting up old work and turning it into new pieces – an action of mending, repair and renewal and may get to show some of these pieces … I’ve always been nervous of painting but I’m rather enjoying it!
I’ve been making cards again for the Year of the rat and reminding myself of how to make linocuts!
Despite the cancer I have actually developed my practice this year as I set out to. So now I need to think of some aims for next year!
My piece Chemo Day Drawing 13 June 2019 is currently touring as part of the The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019 exhibition which will be on show in The Chainstore at Trinity Buoy Wharf from 18 January to 1 February 2020. This will be the first opportunity for the public to see the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019 exhibition in London since the launch and Awards Announcement on 25 September 2019 prior to its tour to The Salisbury Museum.
The exhibition will be open daily from 11am to 4pm at Trinity Buoy Wharf and is free to see. The exhibition includes 68 drawings by 62 artists and makers, and will be accompanied by a programme of events held in the education space adjacent to the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019 exhibition in The Chainstore. Group visits may also be arranged.
These days I mainly work small: restrictions of having to work in a chemo chair; working at home when the weather is miserable and I don’t want to risk catching a cold… But as well as these practical reasons working small is intimate and domestic and I work flat/ A review of Lee Krasner’s “Little Image paintings” makes the point that working flat is a vigorous attempt to get away from an easel esthetic. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/edelman/edelman9-15-08.asp
… something I have been doing for a while but find this an interesting take, even if in other art traditions or cultures it doesn’t have the same meaning, for example in Japanese or Chinese painting where the apparently strange perspective has I think been explained by the fact that the artists worked low, close to the floor.
I have been taking old work, cutting it up, gluing it and have started reworking the resulting configuration, still using some of my favourite paper: Chinese calligraphy practice paper. It is rough stuff and the gridlines are wonky and and inconsistent. It comes in various qualities, some with less size I would think. For me it both references the link between drawing and writing and the Modernist grid, though some of the work is definitely sliding into painting.
So here are my last chemo day drawings of 2019: a delay in delivering the drugs as they have to be prepped on the day and the driver was 2 hours late means I had time to do 3 as I was at the hospital for 7 hours altogether.
Chemo treatment continues so I will be starting my 2020 drawings at the end of the month.
