Crap but honest
I have been looking back through my knicker draw sketch books, full of scrawls and scribbles. I like to make comment and sketches in the last moments before going to sleep after most of my brain has already been disengaged. In this way it is the drawings that can show me how I feel or what I am struggling with and not the other way round. Sometimes it is surprising sometimes just a scribble. I know these books are valuable to me but I often wonder just how to employ what they come up with in my work. I sometimes take the drawings into lino cuts but there seems to be a gap between this work and my other paintings and prints. It is like I have the internal work and the external work. I would like to try to bring them together a bit more. I feel another set of monotypes coming on..perhapse.
Mmm Indian yellow
An old favourite on the watercolour pallet but a new addition to the oils, I am so enjoying its yellowy goodness. All in all I am having too much fun at the moment knocked off stride a little by half term but back to it next week. I am just having difficulty choosing and image for the East Cheshire Hospice art fair catalogue. It’s quite hard to pick just one image to represent your work.
Excited by pattern
I had a very exciting week in the studio (well Tuesday afternoon and a bit of Wednesday…that is a studio week for me). The work seems to becoming more and more about surface and pattern and I am enjoying it very much. I have 3 gesso panels on the go based on the shapes, patterns and colours of lichen on rocks. I like the panels and I love the smooth surface its helping me blend over some of the qualities and techniques’ I use in the monotype work.
I also had an exciting find at the weekend, we took the kids to the national history museum and they were looking at the gem stones in the shop. I was taken by some of the patterns on the Leopard skin Jasper or what I am now calling my Klimt stones. I have ideas lots of them. I may be in danger of starting so much work I never get any finished….we’ll see….Maybe it will work out because when I finally got round to ringing the local art centre about an exhibition (I was thinking next year)I found out I was look at autumn 2012. Apparently it has been very popular since our open studio exhibitions last May! I still have the East Cheshire art fair in October to work to but I think I need to explore other opportunities to show my work.
FOUND THINGS
I found and image the other day it was just a bit of pavement near the kid’s school, broken and mended and worn. The soft pale greys contrasting beautifully with the red of the left over grit. It got me thinking about the images I use, about what gets me going and how I am more about trying to present what I have found than actually making the images myself. It also made me think of the girl who won the school of Saatchi programme and some of the conversations that were going on at that time amongst family and friends, about it not being “real art” because she just found it. Perhaps then the art is in the finding of the images, or maybe I am not a real artist ether;) I just wish I didn’t find the presenting them such a struggle sometimes. Mind you at other times I find the process a sheer joy even if the results don’t always hit the mark.
I am going back to that bit of pavement this weekend weather permitting with my camera.
Itching to get going and a little frustrated by the snow, the school has been closed and the not getting into work didn’t bother me as much as the not getting into my studio. Yesterday however my partner took the kids sledging and gave me a couple of hours up there. I managed to take a proof print off the lino I had been cutting but it needs more work (didn’t get as much cutting as I had hoped to but hey ho that’s Christmas).
So I decided to do a monotype I had been planning. At last some satisfaction messy painty, colour, summer colours!. I was having fun but I over ran, the family came back and I lost my flow a little pleading with my 4 year old that he could watch but please don’t touch…..he just couldn’t help it. I cleaned him up and managed to finish my print I think I was quite pleased with it…so a good start.
