The Cooler King (part 2)

Pantomime

For the next few weeks I am very busy: How on earth am I going to describe this:

A ‘Theatre Outreach’ project?

A series of temporary installations

An art trail…(that can’t be quite right)

It reminds me of a kind of ‘Challenge Anika’ event, I have a hired a van instead of using a helicopter.

It’s called Robinson Crusoe, yet it is more like Treasure Island!

The last email I had called it the ‘Doubloon Hunt’

It’s fast, intense and not quite like anything I have ever done before.

It is very definitely ‘Pantomime’.

I am working with 10 schools and will be charging around Hampshire in a hired van with a borrowed sat nav.

To make 10……er ……call ‘em tableaux’s or temporary installations to be installed in a posh public park.

It’s something I agreed to because it was so different from anything I have done and I thought I would need a break from the cooler and all that mosaic. As it turns out I have not been able to do a lot of mosaic recently due to a rushed design for Southwark as the deadline for that was while I’m in Hampshire so I had to squeeze that in before I went.

I have two Rooks in the mosaic to make and I would love to be able to just do them, but they will have to wait now.

I have managed to build a little momentum with this blog as well, but I will be unable to update it while I’m away and will have to leave it for another time.

So I must pull a little stronger on the oars and keep my weather eye open Capt’n Sir, it’s pirates, treasure, sea monsters, fairy godmothers, treasure maps, sailing ships, getting lost, sward fighting, heavy storms and damsels in distress on my watch. You may lay to that Capt’n.

But not necessarily in that order.

I would like to add a post script to my earlier post. Which in fact is all twaddle.

I started drawing this morning, bold with my new found freedom and things started OK, but I realised that when it came to making the cartoon for this mosaic it was enlargement by the grid system only that would transfere it. Which is OK but I felt it could be so much easier.

I needed a scafolding under this, drawing, a structure, formula, and familiarity in pattern making. It needed reliable easily created reference points not guessed ones which become distorted through some kind of transcribing process.

I abandoned my squares, twisting and stretching them was way too complicated and started a new drawing.

I drew a circle without really thinking about it and projected a couple points using a set squares and intuativley felt that my worries were over, the relationship between the inner design and outer design was going to be easily generated.

I put on a CD called ‘trance anthems’ and it all came together silky smooth.

Circles… I recomend them they are the answer to all things!.

It’s been one of those days

One of those days where I’ve tried to reinvent the wheel, and wasted a lot of it. This morning I wrote Spinney Fields in brown tiles with an off white background!

During the afternoon I had to finalise a design for another mosaic client. I have to do this before I go away on my theatre outreach workshops, so it’s tight on time. This had to be a proper drawing with dimensions and scale on, as well as finalized design content as it will serve as my working drawing and needs to be agreed with architects and project managers etc. I have a sketch but that’s not what is required as foundations have to be made from this drawing, so calculating correct dimensions is critical for the building contractors and me. As I want what I make to fit what they build.

I confused myself with scales and ratios and found an online calculator where you type in your measurements for your drawing size and then type the actual real world size……. and hey presto, it calculates the scale in a millisecond……just the thing I need to progress my drawing…..eh…..but the answer I got was not even a number, it said ‘infinity’! No the question with that answer, is how long it is taking me to do this drawing!

So frustrating, as I was taking dimensions from my 1:10 scale sketch and using the formula ‘half as big again’ to all the measurements required and it generated a nice new drawing… in proportion and everything, but I did not know the scale? The computer told me this was ‘infinity’ which didn’t help. So I recalculated and had to do a whole new drawing at a scale of 1:6.

The other thing I have wrestled with today is geometry! I tried to mathematically recreate the shapes I had drawn using geometry as this would be quick and systematic…particularly useful when preparing the cartoon later. It was dawning on me that what my sketch showed looked like geometry but wasn’t really. So I went back to my original source material to see if that was generated geometrically …..The answer was, I had merged a couple of traditional carpet motifs together which were quite geometric but not exactly.

So I was never going to replicate this sketch with true geometry as it was impossible and I was going to have to make it look like geometry!

So I will create a pretend geometry, one that looks composed and balanced and mathematical but is actually just drawn close to geometry. It has taken me all day to accept that? Why………..unable to tell you……some kind not allowed to break the rules type thing has pressed on me all day …..But all of a sudden I was released from a rule that did not even need to be there.

Today I failed to re-draw a drawing I already did!

That sounds silly, but it is true. I have used a valuable day on this and you can’t afford to have off days when working in the public realm.

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My list this morning:

Van hire x2 weeks

Check workshop materials for things to use

Email CRB cert

Email Invoice/contract

Book B+B x2 weeks plus other days

Order Plextol D498 x 5 litres

Check pots with screw top lids for paints

Brushes enough?

Exrtra hole saw over 55mm wide and chuck attachment

Check jig saw blades?

Prices/thickness of shuttering ply?

Screws?

Bundles of batterning?

Clerk of works installation/certificate/dates

The ones in red are the ones I havn’t done yet!…..red….. lost in lost in Ctrl V.

So I wont be in the cooler much: As I have agreed to an intense theatre community outreach project. I will have to let ‘art’ as we know it go. For this project the values change.

It will be about, bringing people into cultural activity, inclusiveness, experiencing new materials and working methods, process, education, cross discipline activity.

It will confront those things I always bump into at school? Which is making things, this often challanges the status quo. To make things you need tools and using tools with school children falls into a area of

‘er woh…. tools and you need to plug that in’ and er woh……you want children to cut things’

or ‘er woh…. paint’

‘er woh, what 8×4 feet and there are 6 of them and there are in the back of the van outside somewhere’.

I noticed amongst my paper work in any other comments; One school wrote;

‘Not all children have aprons’

Now that’s my kind of school. Because I’m coming with 6 inch brushes, 5 litres of primer, power tools and a van of stuff to make a show that must go on.

I was in the dentists 4 days ago and the dentist’s assistant said to me, ‘I hear you’re an artist?’

I smiled and said, ‘who told you that then’

she said, I have well informed sources!’

I said , ‘I’ve been rumbled then’.

she said, what sort of art do you do?…..painting?

Why does every one say that, ‘do you Paint’. Is it because that is what they think art is?

I did not say that, but said, ‘No…I used to paint, but I always work in public spaces now like parks, or town squares, nature reserves or train station type places’. And waited to see what she said.

I don’t think she was interested and wanted to tell me about her daughter who was an artist and went on to list the colleges or universities she had gone to and some places where she had exhibitions.

I said, ‘she sounds like she is busy then’!

I then had more information about her most recent exhibition currently on now and something about shipping her work to Australia and I wondered inwardly who might have paid those shipping costs, I think these shipping costs were in the future, but as I had just received quite a lot of information I was a little muddled and didn’t quite know what to say next.

What I should have said was ‘Where about in Australia?’

What came out after what seemed like just slightly too long was ‘I don’t tend to do exhibitions’. At this point And I was expecting to have to open my mouth and be unable to speak….But

She said what do you do then if you don’t have exhibitions of your paintings?

I explained that I responded to adverts in the trade press where artists were paid to make commissioned work using lottery funding or some kind of public funds.

This triggered a response ‘she doesn’t pay for the petrol or the gallery hire….no guess who pays that’? I did not have to guess because I knew it was her family. ‘No it is difficult’ I said. What am I supposed to do at this point in the conversation….I was starting to feel a collective guilt on behalf of all artists….burdens on the families who support them, and responsible for spending scarce public funds on art that is misplaced, not wanted and up itself. I was actually relieved when the dentist loomed over me and started poking long thin pointed things in my mouth, saying ‘have the antibiotics worked?’

On the same day as the dentist I heard about an interview by Jeremy Paxman with Russell Brand and I have to say ……how good is this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnV0ihSk690

I can’t imagine I will ever take a general election seriously ever again.

Jeremy Paxman and an impassioned Russell Brand talking about our political system I think it might be even better than Greyson Perry.

Apparently according to a PM listener on radio 4 there used to be a piece of graffiti in west London that said ‘don’t vote….it will only encourage them’.

Dare to think of another way and not feel guilty about being an artist.