Thoughts of Spring

Despite the wintry weather today my thoughts have been of spring. I've begun a new drawing based on a photograph I took a couple of years ago...


I made a 30 second sketch to remind myself of how I want to interpret the light and shade in the image, plus a few notes to remind myself of a theme I intend to pursure over the next year or so...


...of fenced in spaces, nature held in check behind a grid of gate or netting. Though nothing really holds nature in check, she will always get her own way in the end.


I've had this theme in mind since last year and took a few photo's in preparation. There's a fence at the bottom of my more advanced work in progress. I feel like I've been working on this one for half my life. The pine needles have been a real headache. Aptly, post Christmas.

A journey into the dark of heartness...

Yesterday I spent my lunch hour in the dark at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. I'm always a little lost in the new wing, although it's very fine architecturally the doors to the various exhibitions are not clearly indicated and you never quite know what's going to be on the other side.

Entering Shona Illingworth's film installation Balnakiel, you first peer into pitch blackness. Gradually your eyes adjust to see a series of white arrows on the floor, following these arrows you find yourself pushing through a black curtain into more darkness. At this point you might become worried, as the did people who entered the exhibition a few minutes after me with cries of 'what kind of a place is this! It's too dark!' But persevere, because the mystery is part of the pleasure.

The sound reaches you first, a vivid soundtrack weighted with drama; a military jet spreads a contrail of noise through the darkened gallery, a patchwork of voices, discordant snippets all of which build to repeated and often emotionally affecting crescendos while images pan and shift of a bleak yet beautiful landscape; seen from the air or from the multi-windowed control tower of a military base, silver clouds or the eerie, geologically ancient sea battled landscape of Balnakiel, a village on the North West tip of Scotland.

Shona Illingworth has created a film and soundscape of this remote Scottish village in the midst of a noisy, densely populated Black Country city - a wonderful disorientating and affecting piece of art that takes the viewer (or the artistic explorer) by surprise. For me the experience was so vivid that I lost literal time. Peering at my watch by the screen-light I realised that I had stayed much longer than I had thought and had to hurry out and back to the office, to a world so grey that it has to be lit by fluorescent tubes even on a sunny February afternoon.

The exhibition, which runs until 1 May 2010, is one of the most effective and affecting pieces I've seen in a long time. I'll certainly be taking this journey again.


Sudden and brief, snow this afternoon...


...while working on my current pen and ink piece, PW PW 2001...



...and listening to this excellent play on Radio 4.

WATERSIDE OPEN 2010

I was very pleased to receive an acceptance of a drawing for the 2010 Waterside Open, to be held at the Lauriston Gallery in Sale. For one thing, I'm relieved that I didn't beg G the favour of driving me up to Manchester last Saturday for nothing (we'll be paying a return visit this Saturday, as I had one drawing not accepted - think 'glass half full' Kay, I keep telling myself). I'm really pleased though, especially as this week hasn't been wonderful for me. I've been in some pain with a problem with my right hand, which yesterday erupted into a huge lumpy bruise (swollen knuckes, painful joints and skin that looks like orange peel with a rash). I'm doing my best to work through the pain though. If I can't do my artwork, or hold a pen to write, I don't know what I'll do.

I've been enjoying the snow his week, even though it makes commuting difficult. This is one of the few times I'm glad I can't drive. I don't envy all those stressed, snowbound drivers digging themselves out of parking spaces, turning over frozen engines.

The beauty of snow touches me every time. I thought today that with all those contrasts of black on white, it's the closest I get to walking into one of my drawings. Last Saturday was actually a gorgeous day, and after G and I dropped off my drawings we called at Tatton Park for lunch, and to glory in the magic.

I've made a little more progress on my re-working of 'Wood From The Trees'.

Black and White

So cold this morning that the condensation had frozen on the inside of my bedroom windows. It's been a long time since that happened!


So beautiful, and yet...brrrr....the old thermometer in our verandah has more white in it than red...it's been hanging there as long as I've lived in this house, so it's more than 40 years old...






The photo' above isn't of a bleak and desolate moorland landscape but a piece of fossil encrusted mud I picked up at Kilve Beach about 15 years ago. It's propped up against my bedroom window.


I've been working from life today, only managed 3 drawings, including this portrait of a weary looking Mom watching Loose Women. She said it doesn't look like her.


Earlier this morning I perched on a ladder upstairs on our landing to draw Mom's cardigan draped over a heap of laundered curtains and towells. I like the shapes, but my bum got rather numb sitting there for so long. It's been a very long time indeed since I worked in charcoal properly. When I was younger I liked the painterly qualities of this medium, I especially liked to use Conte crayon, because you could go very dark and moody with it. I never did like the messiness of it though, or the fact that it was so easy to smudge and ruin your hard work. Pen and ink is such a clean medium, if you can manage to avoid too many splats and blobs. But I still like the painterly moodiness of charcoal.

I've ideas for still life subjects I'd like to pursue with a mixture of drawing mediums, I'd like to work on a large scale too. But although I can see the collection of objects I want to draw in my mind's eye, do you think I can find them for real? I'll have to keep searching I suppose.

Epiphany

Today the Christmas decorations come down (I've always found this day depressing, I get used to the glint of tinsel and fairy lights). It's very cold here in the Black Country, but beautiful for once, with everything smothered and refined by snow. The view from the train station this morning was breathtaking, the sky heavy and pink, snow feathering down like interference on an old TV. The canal that was frozen hard yesterday, encrusted with harder previously frozen and fractured ice, was today completely hidden, the towpath and canal was merely a dip running alongside the railway track.

I feel like my boat has been blown off course this week, and now I'm struggling to get it back on track. I was bought for Christmas (among other things) a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence which exactly matches my mood at the moment. I've always liked being on my own, but lately I really crave my own company. Perhaps, like in Sara Maitland's book, it's my 'certain age' that's driving this need to 'vant to be alone'. I'm not 100% convinced about the age thing though, I know many women my own age who like to chat (my Mum loves Loose Women, women of a 'certain age' every one, and not a shrinking violet amongst them). I've never been chatty, I'm starting to feel quite guilty about it. I'm starting to feel I let people down by not being what they expect me to be, like when I'm called 'love' in shops by total strangers, often younger than myself. I've never been anyone's 'love' and doubt that I ever will be. Not in the cosy sense of the word in any case. I've always been solitary. I suppose (like many people) I need a Lotto win to make the solitude possible.

I watched a really moving film last week, North Face a German film about an attempt just before the war to climb the North Face of the Eiger. It was unremittingly realistic and harrowing, yet beautiful in the bleakest sense of the word. Another book that currently has one of my bookmarks travelling slowly through it (slower than the traffic crawling towards Burnt Tree Island) is Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind. I read his Wild Places the year before last and loved it. He writes beautifully and I envy his intellect and his exploratory toughness.

Solitude is so often looked upon by society as being 'wrong' but it must come naturally to so many people. Sara Maitland says in her book that people called her selfish for wanting to be alone, but with enough money in her bank account to rent a remote cottage, did it really matter what people thought? People have done a lot more harmful things than removed themselves from society. Being solitary harms no one. It may even be fruitful (in Maitland's case solitude allowed her to produce this book, many writers and artists have turned their solitude into objects of beauty and fascination). There is just so much talk in this world, so much noise. And so little meaning.

It's been a long time since I drew myself. I always look so miserable! Here's what I've done this evening, in the growing dark.