The residue of an unspecified ritual and journeying to no end

Chrysopoeia

Transmutation into Gold.

I always felt a particular affinity for the alchemist; half scientist, half magician, glass bottles, coloured smokes, working away into the night, purification, unification, treading between the myth and the reality.

Last night I created a series of images out of film photographs of Fools Gold I captured at the Specola crystal exhibition. I should very much like to develop these images further through printing.

Thinking about Alchemy inspired me today to get down to the Galileo Museum.

And I’m so very glad I did. It been one of those days that’s just be fantastic inspirational wise, feeling a rush of warm tingly ideas and notions filling my head as I admired and inspected all the archaic scientific instruments. The thermometers were particularly wonderful.

And I bought paint today. Oil paint. And turpentine. Does a painter lurk within me after all?

I have just been catching up with Susan Francis’s blog, ‘Flesh on the Bones of the Belfast Child’ and I came across an entry where she had quoted myself:

‘…Now if I was to create a representational image I use my camera, I reserve my drawings for notions, suggestion and whispers’

Reading back my own words there seemed something mildly fraudulent to them, as over these last few weeks I have been making 100s of observational drawings, and while they as not realistic per se, they certainly dawdle close to representational. Although the majority of the museums in Tuscany do forbid photography so a drawing is only way I have available to record the objects and artifacts that catch my eye, so perhaps not a change in the philosophy of my practice after all. But she asks an important question – ‘why do we draw!’

Something else has been on my mind. Every day tourists see me sketching away and keenly lean over my sketchbook expecting to see Di Vinci-esk drawing, most walk away with a look of confusion, and a few have uttered ‘I don’t understand abstract art’. Abstract Art. Am I an Abstract artist? It certainly not a title I’d apply to myself, but I better double-check this. I listened to a 5 hour podcast of the ‘Abstraction Study Day’ that ran at the Tate for some advice.

My conclusion? Well firstly let me say that I write this query in mild jest, as I have little desire the title myself at all. But what did stand out to me in the Tate Talk was the discussion about how the art of non-western cultures, Aboriginal, Navajo, African tribal arts, is not considered Abstract art.

Considering my notions behind my drawings, the ideas of meditation, subconscious narratives, mark making as a ritualistic response to my surroundings, perhaps my drawings are more closely aligned with the work of the cultures I’ve been studying at the Anthropology museum than that of an Abstract artist.

But then again I am not of these cultures, I am an artist working in the 21^st century, where the decision to make a non-representational image has a different function.

Ponder ponder..

When I was young I liked to collect crystals.

I was never too interested in their names, their properties, never sought to get one of every kind or display them proudly on my bookshelf. I kept them in my pockets, and took them out occasionally to admire the way the light reflects and refracts through the stone. Holding them up to the sun, and pressing my eyes so close that I became immersed in the coloured crystal world.

Firenze holds a spectacular crystal exhibition at the Specola Museum, and while it seems futile to try to capture the crystals aura and presence in a quick sketch, I can but make a few quick gestures and marks in honour of these little (and sometimes quite large) natural phenomena’s.

The introduction of colour into my work (pre-Firenze I drew only in mono- toned mono-print) seems to be leading me in quite a painterly direction? After four years of a Painting course is it finally time to take up the challenge of paint? Doubtful, I don’t think I’ve convinced myself of it yet. But what I am sure of is that these abstracted shapes, scribbles and smudges of colour are forming an important reference point for future work, wether that be a painting, a sculpture or something else.

These loose gestures that I’m filling my sketchbooks with are the start of something. Something I am going to delight in exploring when I return to British soil.

“If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?” Dr. Laurence J. Peter

In my final year the tutors would often remark that my studio space resembled something like a junk shop, as they gingerly stepped over drying ceramics, half finished collages and avoided the various hanging oddities; bones casts, horns, homemade musical instruments, light bulbs, drying prints… My desks pilled high with animal skins, skulls, bird’s nests, a multitude of plaster and latex test pieces, suitcases full of fabrics both exotic and tacky spilled out onto the floor mingling with the reclaimed wood I’d sourced off Glasgow’s streets.

It was often suggested that I bring the junkshop environment to my degree show installation, but for various reasons it never entirely came together that way.

This idea of exploring ‘junk shop as installation’ still rings true to me though, and I think it’s a concept certainly worth exploring now I have to time and ability to think with a clearer, more rested mind. Beginning to inquire into this idea again I’ve have conducted a few 35mm studies of the junk shops at Piazza die Ciompi.

My time here in Firenze is being wonderful for getting some breathing space after the degree show. It’s not only giving me time to deal with things I locked in a mental box in 4^th year, time to morn, grieve, cry, laugh; it’s also giving me time to test out artistic endeavours without the pressure of a final grading.

And this is marvellous.

She was not breathing at all. She was dead. They lifted her up and looked for something poisonous. They undid her laces. They combed her hair. They washed her with water and wine. But nothing helped. The dear child was dead, and she remained dead. They laid her on a bier, and all seven sat next to her and mourned for her and cried for three days. They were going to bury her, but she still looked as fresh as a living person, and still had her beautiful red cheeks.

They said, “We cannot bury her in the black earth,” and they had a transparent glass coffin made, so she could be seen from all sides. They laid her inside, and with golden letters wrote on it her name, and that she was a princess. Then they put the coffin outside on a mountain, and one of them always stayed with it and watched over her. The animals too came and mourned for Snow-white, first an owl, then a raven, and a dove.