Random Writes.

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.

I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Has Gone. Song by Johnny Nash 1972

Last week I was all set to write my first ever rant about the contemporary use (or misuse) of the word sketch. I did my research and made the notes but something got in the way of me actually writing it. That seems like a long time ago now.

For some while there have been slight changes in my eyesight and I was long overdue for a visit to the opticians. Small things, at first easy to explain away as part of ageing but then recently something more sinister. When I sit down at the computer the screen it appears to bow outwards towards me-it is so real that I have put my hands out to touch it-all a bit Alice-in-Wonderland. Also not recognising old friends in the street, or worse still being convinced that they are someone else and having a completely one-sided conversation with them while they stand there looking bemused.

After ruling out Alzheimer’s and early onset dementia, I put the symptoms into Google and up popped Macular Degeneration. The penny dropped, my Mum has it and is now at 93 registered blind. She was diagnosed with AMD about 30 years ago and has always coped remarkably well. I recently bought her a Paperwhite Kindle which has a lit screen and giant font size and she uses it every day.

I was still scared when my husband finally made the appointment last Friday morning, within the hour, at Vision Express. The optician was very thorough and ran lots of tests including a photo of the back of the eyeball that looked like an exotic planet. Eventually he put a piece of gridded A5 paper into my hands and told me to focus on the spot in the middle. Around the dot all the previously straight horizontal and vertical lines began moving into badly aligned boxes. Horrified I said rather too loudly: “That’s it isn’t it, I’ve got it haven’t I?” The optician said soothingly that we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves and that we should finish the tests. But I knew.

I came out of the examination room with the little piece of gridded paper and the name of the vitamin supplements that will (hopefully) slow the progression of the course the disease. I blindly and hastily, bought a horribly expensive pair of glasses and then stocked up on vitamins and a delicious turquoisy-grey coloured eye pencil.

I told my mother, she is from the School of No-Nonsense and although sad for me, has helped me put it all into perspective. Around me people I know and don’t know, struggle daily with worse things. I want to do as much as possible while my sight is good, I am greedy for art to look at and to read about and to write and to make. I got a bit stuck when I thought about writing the blog, to tell or not to tell, it felt like an awfully big thing to not say. Well I have done it now and already it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Where are my paints?

Curiosity- Overspill. Part 1.

What is it about exhibitions at Turner Contemporary? The latest one Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing and I are made for each other. As with the Munoz figures that I have warbled on about in these pages, Curiosity has quietly pervaded my brain like a happy virus, one of the best things about it is that in mixing everything up and questioning categories it validates some of my weirder work for example: To Augment.

On my second visit yesterday, looking closely at previously missed African dolls, I realised that they had come from Quex Park Natural History Museum, and collected by Antoinette Powell-Cotton daughter of the Major responsible for the collection. Q P is situated half a mile from my childhood home. The first visit aged ten piqued a lifelong interest in natural history, anthropology and of course taxidermy, as QP is stuffed to the gunnels with stuffed animals. It is where I learned the importance of context and understood that the Victorians saw the taxidermy of a limited number of wild animals for education and display as a better option than trying to bring back and keep live animals with the huge loss of life that would entail.

By the age of sixteen as frequent visitor, always drawing the exhibits I was given a pass that enabled me to go in free, I still have it. Years later I was approached by a group of local supporters and commissioned to make a portrait of Antoinette Powell-Cotton, (daughter of Major Powell-Cotton founder of the museum) known to all as Miss Toni. I was so excited to meet her here is an extract of an article written at the time:

“Miss Toni took me on a tour of her small stately home to find a suitable place to paint the portrait. I found the large rooms too formal, and eventually settled in the nursery where the scale was decidedly more human. We then had to select what Miss Toni was going to wear and opened up her cupboards full of formal clothes. I urged her to choose something she felt comfortable in and that best represented her, she shyly admitted to liking best, a beautiful yellow African robe, she came alive in it.

We spent several pleasant hours in the nursery on small chairs and she told me about her incredible life. She had travelled around Africa with her father collecting specimens and becam an archaeologist of note. In WW1 when the estate was turned into a Red Cross hospital, she nursed wounded soldiers, laid out amongst the stuffed animals. It was one of the recuperating soldiers, also an artist, who painted the first back drop that gave the idea for the diaromas for which QP is famous.

Unfortunately the portrait was never finished due to Miss Toni’s failing health and this pastel sketch is all that remains.”

In retrospect I can see that Miss Toni was in some ways an anachronism and out of kilter in the latter part of her life, as could be said of Quex Park. But oh how lucky I am I to have the memory of those conversations. Curiosity has re-framed and re-awakened my feelings of nostalgia and curiosity; I think it’s time I went back.

Regression: A return to a former or less developed state. Where was I? Oh yes, my dog died, or rather after four months of procrastination we took our beloved sixteen and a half year old pet on her last trip to the Vet’s, it ought to be called Dognitas. I am making jokes but I know that anyone who has experienced the hideous see-sawing of guilt and compassion that accompanies pet euthanasia, will empathise. So I mention this because, ever curious, I am interested in the effect of this mental trauma on my work. The empty, hairfree, house was too much to bear so we headed off back to my “special place” Lyme-Regis to take advantage of its restorative powers. Lately I have been working on an engrossing writing project and although it stretches me creatively in other ways, I had begun to miss the materiality of making. While out rummaging in a wonderfully eclectic second-hand shop full of treasure or “tat” (my mother’s definition), I found a small statue of the Manekin Pis, slightly larger than one I already own. Later in the lavatory of a rustic pub I was forced to steal an unused paper towel because of its gorgeous colour and particularity of embossed pattern. And so it continued, greedily feeding my starved aesthetic senses, this bit of plastic bag (but only this bit) that bit of gold card this bottle top. Back at home the drive to play with and assemble my recently found found objects was stronger than ever, so I just gave in. Much, playing, arranging, etc. Later and two works have made it through the passport control of my self-consciousness and both seem to refer back to earlier more naive work. Having felt so driven and then rushing to finish, I must confess to feeling a bit lost, I am not sure where (if anywhere) this is leading. But then Thursday night I was present at the opening of Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing at Turner Contemporary and saw a film by Tacita Dean of Claus Oldenburg in his studio. On the surface it is a quiet unremarkable film of an old man pottering about in his studio, where he is apparently tidying and dusting objects on rows of shelves. After a while you notice his constant, slightly obsessive re-arranging, posing and re-re-positioning of objects, and slowly there is an awareness that he is making new connections, relationships and dialogues between things, reflecting on old ones and re-seeing, re-imagining and opening up possibilities for new work. All of this is so familiar to me and I would imagine resonates with all artists to some extent, this realisation shored up and validated my bag lady tendencies, inappropriate collections of the lost and broken things, and hours spent arranging my weird stuff with the zeal of a fashion stylist. It takes one to know one. Review of Curiostity: Art and The Pleasures of Knowing to follow.