Still Life.
Whitelands Farm then…seems to be going so slow. Finished a mouse and struggled with the corn, kept changing my mind on how to make corn and in the end settled for each grain being made of four tiles instead of two. Once a system is in place then things speed right up and progress is quicker. Doing fields at the moment and again a colour system is needed for each area.
It’s not like paint I can’t just add a bit of yellow to get the right colour. It’s all about mixing colours optically on the paper to achieve an overall effect …….a blend from a distance….can be really tricky.
While I was doing the farm buildings and the edges of the fields in this mosaic I remembered seeing several public footpath signs leading across fields and several farms between where I live and the woodlands a couple of miles away. So I have this morning I spent a couple of hours or more traversing these public footpaths on my bike around these farms. Every time I saw footpath sign I went along it. There turned out to be so many different paths I didn’t even reach the woods. The signs for these paths sometimes just disappear leaving you to ride where you think it might be!….Found myself riding through sheep, horses, horse jumps, past rusty machinery cows and lifted my bike over countless gates, just totally lost in muddy farms for ages and ages. And never once was accosted for trespassing, which I felt was amazing. I did see one bloke carrying a plastic bag walking towards me and wondered if he was going to shout ‘ GET OFF MY LAND’. As I passed him it turned out he was carrying a muddy car battery in the other hand and said ‘Morning’ quite friendly.
So I got a feel for fields surrounding farms alright which is what my next mosaic task is!
And I would also like to say that I heard Grayson Perry mention on the radio the other day that ‘pottery’ played second fiddle to other art forms, which was one of the reasons that drew him to pottery and made him want to work in that medium. Well…….I used to paint ‘still lifes’ when I was at school and loved doing them, really loved them, choosing the objects and arranging them and everything, even a view out of the window in the background, lost in a world of things I liked. But when I went to collage I was made to feel this was an inferior way of working, and what I really aught to be doing was some proper macho, expressionist, action paintings about plasticity and get to grips with proper painting issues….even epic history painting was better than STILL LIFE.…move on. Unlike Grayson Perry I believed this advise to be true and left still life alone ….
I shall be in Amsterdam for a few days on holiday next week and might re-acquaint my relationship with the ‘still life’ after all these years apart.
Glue Making and a look inside the Cooler.
The glue I use to stick the tiles to the paper is made from plain flour and water. This was begining to break down and go a little runny for my liking ….not mouldy yet, just a little runny. So I decided to put it back in the sausepan and add a little more flour to thicken it up.
I like the paste quite thick so the tiles are able to slide on top of the glue while it is still wet. this makes arranging them much easier, so thick paste is favourite.
So I popped it back in the pan and thickened it up added a bit more salt as a preservative to delay it going mouldy, and simmered it untill it went like boiling mud in Yellowstone National Park….lovely. Back in my jar and back to work.
Now I thought as there is less water content in the glue it would also dry quicker as the temperature is generally going down and getting cooler, now autumn is setting in, so a thick paste would dry quicker with less moisture in, also advantageous as the reduced moisture does not buckle the kraft paper so much either. It can be pain trying to lay very small tiles on buckled paper (like tiny boats in very rough seas, with troughs of highs and lows).
Now I been in my workshop this morning and the glue has not dried over night, but when it was runny it dried much quicker! eh..dont get that.
But no matter…. I might add a little water to it as it is so thick I had difficulty getting it off the brush and onto the paper into those little nooks and crannys. So its a trade off then between optimun slideability and brushability. Fine adjustment required for maximum glue performance properties.
I made a daisy yesterday and I painted diaseys on my first ever piece of public art back in 1989 in Deptford. I have not put daiseys in everything since, but I have painted many on murals over the years and it has become almost a signature but not quite….I like them though. The days eye which opens all day and shuts at night time.
The Birds:
The relationship to man and birds is very different to man and dog. There is a hedge in our back garden where countless sparrows live. I watch them they are busy zipping off, coming back and zipping off again. Birds live their lives under our noses yet they go unnoticed a lot of the time. They are gateways into nature’s world, once you start watching them and listening to them there seems to be a threshold that you cross to…….. Somewhere….. a daydream place!
I have four birds in this mosaic to make and I have completed two, and found myself creating the landscape behind for these birds. Fields and hills, nice countryside for them, daydream places again. I remember probably the only time when the entrance door to my workshop was open at the same time as the back door, and a pigeon flew straight through in flash of a second. I never ever have both doors open at the same time as it creates a draft which blows all my papers off the table and makes the brown kraft paper stored on the wall in a roll flap vigorously, so I very rarely open both together. This was so surprising I kept thinking about birds and omens, not that believe in them but you could understand why something like that could mean something if you wanted it to? In Guatemala the currency is called the quetzal after the bird. The tail feathers of which were used as money way back in Mayan times….and the Solomon Islands also used red hummingbird feathers as money! I can’t see how that would work, but love anything that radically changes capitalism…..Again my friend Joseph Beuys wanted to influence future politics and remove money and change the understanding of capital to create dignity money?
‘Everybody’s dignity is exchanged as a commodity, the so called salary dependency. To show that money should shift to a democratic regulator of everybody’s work, creativity and dignity. So I would call this kind of understanding of money, the dignity money, the ability money of people’.
If anyone can get a handle on what this actually means then you’re a better man than me Gunger Din. But society without money……wow…. it takes an eccentric artist to try to realize it. Politians I’ve not heard any of those entertaining the concept.
Two more birds to make.
Stop Press
My client has just this second phoned me asking about installation…….I suggested after the winter…whats the rush it took over two years to get here. But I might have to install three mosaics before Xmas. This when I agreed to do another job in the lead up to Xmas at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens……. Doh.
As I may have mentioned earlier the designs for these mosaics were inspired by the Ecological Report written about the development site with guidelines for the developer as what to plant and what type of habitats to create to encourage wildlife and biodiversity on the new site.
What I wondered was…..would I be able to work with something I designed over two years ago? Interestingly it does not seem a problem……After a bit of a struggle I am now well into the third mosaic, something like 8 weeks in the cooler now, but interested and wanting to make this one.
In fact I have other work distractions tomorrow which prevent me from working. Which is anoying. What seems to happen is a ‘little world’ slips over me and I only want to stay in it, ever smaller and smaller and the thought of steping out of it is a drag and unwelcome.
BUT I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE, this little world is unhealthy its sucks you in like something from Star Trek. So I deliberatly said yes to another job which will be starting soon, so I dont spiral into Omega Centuauri or some horse head vortex gallaxy, but that little mosaic world wants to stay insular!
The Bronze Age Burial Mounds if I remeber will be covered over and be part of a Primary School playing field. I think these burial mounds were on the Whitelands Farm somewhere.
Dont it make a difference when you get paid…….8 weeks; a little prompting and reminding and then another small payment from a one day event 6 weeks ago, both went in on the same day.
Booked a holiday yay….
See….. now this is what happens, too much time in the cooler things start going funny!
As I mentioned my friend who has defected to the east…he tells me the ‘old people’ in the east where he is are all getting ready for winter, living in sync with seasons and nature, harvesting stuff and preserving food and that…..bending like willows in the breeze and adapting. He says the ‘new people’ in the west have forgotten all this stuff and one day might have to re-learn it all again. You lot in the west there will be just turning up your heating and supressing nature and trying to dominate it.
I remeber Joseph Beuys again and his thoughts on western man and I’m in the cooler there rolling all this around my mind.
As a ‘new person’ in the privelaged west I feel like I am watching naughty children in the playground, most times I join in and enjoy playing, and then sometimes I say actually ‘that is naughty’. In the end the headmaster bursts on the scene, and we all have march off
in disgrace and wait outside his office and miss the rest of play time.
So maybe then the ‘new people’ have lost the piece of paper with the rules on, rubbed out the lines on the blackboard, can’t find the lid to the jig-saw box and can’t make the puzzle fit back together again and need the teacher to come along and mend it all and make things alright.
So in those quite moments walking home from school on my own I think, I don’t believe the teachers ever coming back, So what’s my next step now then?
