Random Writes.

Bits and Pieces

Another postscript, these are Facebook comments, in response to my last post.

Kate Murdoch: “Ha! ‘Ladies Parts’ – so ’70s. Kind of thing I’d [imagine] car salesman Tony from the Fast Show saying!”

Me: “Yes-‘Selling cars (or sewing) is like making love to a beautiful woman.'”

Laura Callaghan: “There was an interesting discussion about “lady parts” or the “c” word as they had to call it at 11am in the morning, on R4 yesterday on Woman’s Hour…All about reclaiming a word for ladies bits and pieces. ‘VAJAY-JAY’ doesn’t quite cut it in my opinion…!”

Me: Thanks Laura, will listen to that and yes “VAJAY-JAY” and all those other infantile adjectives are not grown up words, but how you clean-up and de-baggage the “c” word, is a difficult one…

Am off to listen to the Woman’s Hour programme…in the meantime please feel free to comment.

Ladies Parts

Three comments about my work this week:

1) Comment on the Wallbreakers websitehttp://thewallbreakers.com/ruth-geldard-to-skirt-i-ii-iii-wall-hang-sculptures/ about a piece of my work called, To Skirt by someone called Enzone Scavone, and I quote in full, “VAJAY-JAY! There, I said it… Now I’m embarrassed.”

2) Old (younger, cooler) male friend in the pub, “I’ve been looking at your website, I love your work-it’s filthy-but I love it.”

3) Man (who bought our car) stands looking intently at To Fold, scratches his head and says, “Am I right in thinking they [the folds] are meant to be ladies parts

I fully accept that those connotations can and will be drawn but however hard it is to believe, that is never my starting point. I make and think-and-make-and-think and that is what comes out.

Postscript

My drawing “live” method is necessarily transactional. Even if that means just eye-contact and a nod, from the performer, I need their permission to feel right. I have never had the desire to draw voyeuristically and find the feigned nonchalance of the posed sitter unbearable. Part of my transaction with the model is a promise to send a copy of the drawing (if they want it) and during Folk Week I caught up with a backlog of promises that included drawings of a band called Gizmo.

We were lucky enough to catch a rare performance at Churchill’s Tavern in Ramsgate, incidentally the same location of my first ever blog post. They come under my favourite genre: Progressive Rock and their performance on thatwarm June night was beyond awesome producing in me a shivery trance-like state that can precede what feels like automatic drawing. I cannot articulate why I choose one person over another, but can only say that when I use instinct and let myself be drawn naturally to someone, then it works out best. If I am pressured for any reason to paint someone I am not drawn to (usually vanity or pride) then it doesn’t work.

I was drawn to a guitarist in Gizmo partly because of his calm stillness, while his guitar was speaking a wild language of its own. My pencil did the same thing…almost without help from me, the other figures grew out of that one. Afterwards a lady (Betty McCartney) seemed keen to have a copy of the drawing explaining that he (the guitarist) had been ill and appeared to be supporting him.

So I was glad to get the picture photographed and sent a copy to Betty (the guitarist’s stepmother) and a couple of days later I was shocked to receive her reply. Here is the letter, reproduced here with kind permission from Martin’s family.

Hi Ruth,

Thank you so much for sending the sketch to me. Unfortunately, you may not have heard that Martin passed away on 12th July. It was all very quick at the end and very heartbreaking

for everyone. He was a super person, leaving behind a legacy of music, and wonderful

memories for us all. […]

I cant tell you how pleased everyone will be that we now have the

sketch. Jane has had a wide circle of people on facebook, trying to find out who you

are as The Churchill was his last gig and everyone was talking about your sketch!!. It is

excellent and as I said at the time, you have caught the essence of the man perfectly.

Once again thank you so much. By the way, Martin was also an artist as is his Dad, Gerry.

With much thanks and kind regards,

Betty McCartney

Martin was just forty-nine, a wonderful musician and accomplished artist. He leaves a wife and two sons Dominic twenty and Felix six. The strange thing is, as I said in my letter to Betty, that it is an odd thing to do, focusing on a stranger for over an hour. In one sense I did not know him at all and yet there is this connection through the drawing, now poignantly highlighted by death’s full stop. It also makes me realise that everything we do however small has a consequence and Betty’s use of the word “essence” rings loud in my head-that is what I am always searching for-this thing that cannot be defined in any academic way and often gets me into trouble…it drives me on.

Martin Reed 1964-2013

http://www.gizmo.uk.com/

Backintheroom.

And I’m back in the room…feels like I have been gone for ages. The truth is I have been in a sort of limbo-like state causing me to question everything unable to orient myself in terms of my practice. I blame the blog, it got me writing and now I can’t stop but where does that leave everything else? Earlier in the year I embarked on a writing project that is every bit as creatively taxing as making. In the meantime, half started bits of painting and lonely textiles linger reproachfully.

During academic study I stopped doing certain things that up until then had been as natural to me as breathing and rigorous aesthetic pruning was necessary in order to take on new concepts and re-evaluate my practice. Prior to 2005, I had begun to draw like a performance artist, always live and sometimes in dodgy situations and there is no doubt that this gave me a buzz. I liked a crowd gathering and sometimes showed off a bit but cared far too much about the sitter and the audience. The subsequent years of not doing it sometimes made me depressed and I felt the lack. My first blog Two Steps Backwards was built on the concern that I no longer drew in any meaningful way. Through the blog process drawing is very much restored but feels different to the before-the-MA drawing, I felt much more humble and if I am honest a bit dry and out of practice and still could not marry up the old enthusiastic show(wo)man me with the academic me.

But something happened yesterday that seems to have changed things, of course not just yesterday, more a chain of events. And then in the middle of Folk Week when my little town of Broadstairs comes alive with music and dancing, I came across a girl and instantly knew that I MUST draw her. She was wearing a costume that could only be described as Jean Paul Gautier does Morris dancing. Such attitude and willingness to model-Corinna, a member of The Wolf’s Head and Vixen Troupe, sat elegantly and with chutzpah on the pavement and I squatted gauchely on the kerb. It-was-fantastic. I could not have cared less who was watching and almost managed not to attach to the outcome, process was everything and time was suspended and all the disparate parts of me reassembled themselves, for an instant, into a coherent whole.

It was also a bit like plate spinning as two lively and wonderfully distracting little girls Rachael and Bella “ferals” of the same troupe, kept asking to be “next.” And so we did the pavement thing again and I scrawled an image in a few minutes-it was like extreme sport. Really.

That was yesterday…24 hours later I am exhausted, after making five drawings in three packed pubs going from tightly self-conscious to abandoned risk taker. The final drawing is of a guy called Ben Mills who I have seen perform many times before (I think this makes a difference), he has an interesting backstory, coming second to Leona Lewis on the X Factor and so is a bit of a legend here. His huge popularity meant that I had to sit on the disgustingly smelly floor of a pub surrounded by dozens of sozzled ladies madly gyrating and occasionally banging me on the head and then making it worse by bending down shouting “SORRY” into my ear.

The drawing undoubtedly looks like him and works as a portrait but possibly because I cared about likeness, less dynamic or fluid than some of the others.

So where is all this going? All my life I have been driven by an inner need to be better, and looked to gurus, Art societies, my Dad, university lecturers and even dinner ladies for approval. In these few drawings I have embraced long outgrown habits (starting with the eyes and working outwards). I am heady with self-imposed freedom and really couldn’t care less whether: it’s in proportion, explores social commentary, adheres to the principles of Sol Lewitt or even if your auntie can paint dewdrops.

And that’s perhaps the point.