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'.

New and Old

Firstly, two posthumous 'happy bithdays' - Elvis Presley and my Nan, two formative figures of my childhood. I lost my Nan almost exactly 24 years ago next month and I still miss her. Love to you Nan, wherever you are.


I've begun another drawing based on the mossy trees photograph, the one on which I based the drawing I finished earlier this week. In that drawing I left large areas of the foreground trees as white space and now I want to make a drawing that explores the texture and patterns of the moss more thoroughly.


I also like the figurative presence the trees in my drawings are taking on, almost in lieu of people or dramatic actors. As I began working on this drawing I started thinking how my rendering of texture and pattern often becomes stylised, and how I might play around with this for decorative effect. As a student I loved using collages of sweet wrappers and crumpled or torn paper, over working the rough texture with pastels and ink. I'm wondering now if this is something I might incorporate into my drawings. So far my attempts at adding colour to my drawings haven't been very successful, or the results haven't been what I've wanted. Adding colour to my pen and ink drawings definitely takes something away. I like the drama and the crispness of black and white and colour only seems to dilute this.


I began my new drawing yesterday, though I was already pondering a drawing of this design when working on the first one. I didn't stretch the paper this time, only stuck it to the plywood support with masking tape. I treated part of the paper with a thin wash of clear gesso mixed with white gouache, which gives a nice gritty and crisp surface to work on. As I laid down my initial pencil marks it struck me that it might also provide a nice surface for a pencil drawing. I've an idea for such a drawing, but it involves sitting in an open doorway and it's too cold for that at the moment!


I've also worked a little more on this old drawing of a Cornish harbour scene. Incredible to believe I began it last decade! One of these days I might finish it.

Finally, there was a touching obituary of Craigie Aitchison on Last words this afternoon. Although I don't know much about his work, his was a very distinctive style and by the sound of it he was quite a colourful character. How I envy people who can just be themselves without any constraints of self-consciousness or worrying about pleasing others. Just being 'yourself' - it's truly a gift.

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.

Today I collected my Shap Abbey drawing from the RBSA where a very nice man helped me find my picture from the store. His name was Gordon Shaw, a lecturer, artist & RBSA member. He told me that he works on large scale abstract work, though he used to work with a very fine Rotring pen and watercolour wash. He was very complimentary about my work and generously showed me a lovely pencil drawing and a pen and ink drawing with water colour wash he had designed for a Chrismtas card a few years ago. He showed me these on his iphone where he keeps a portfolio of pieces, a great idea I think. I get extremely nervous when taking my work to galleries (I'm generally a very nervous person, social situations are a problem for me) so I was very grateful for Mr Shaw's kindness & the generous interest he showed in my work. He told me that his son, who's a graphic designer, is designing a website for him. I'll keep an eye open for it.

I wouldn't have got anywhere today if it hadn't been for my friend G, who had earlier taken me to Ikea in Wednesbury to look for picture frames. Later, after collecting my drawing from the RBSA I treated myself to Thames and Hudson's lavishly illustrated publication of David Hockney's 'Secret Knowledge' his exploration of the relationship between art and photography, or rather how artists have made use of the camera obscura and the camera lucida - my copy sits on my desk as I type this, still pristine in its polythene wrapping. I'm saving it for later.

Hockney's book is particularly of interest to me as I work mainly from my own photographs which I take with a digital camera and print on an HP inkjet printer. I enjoy working from photographs, I see no shame in it, after all I believe the artist's interpretation is the valid thing, the artist's hand and eye are where the magic happens (and the brain, of course) and not in their geographical proximity to their subject matter when attempting to make that magic happen. In effect I begin my own drawing the moment I make the decision to take a photograph of the subject.

That said, for a multitude of reasons I know I should discipline myself to work regularly from life as well as from photographic sources, something which I do not at present do. So when G dropped me off home this evening I made a couple of quick sketches of Mom in her favourite pose - watching TV. I drew the portrait using Derwent's water soluble graphite pencils (but ended up not dissolving the graphite), for the sketch of her legs and feet I used a 5b pencil. I realise that they aren't the best drawings, and that I can be quite a lazy draftsperson if I'm not totally engaged in what I'm observing. It's something I should work on, if I'm going to progress with my artwork with any seriousness.

I've just noticed my error in dating the feet...I'm still in the old decade...best foot foward into the new now I suppose.

LINES

I'm putting my drawing aside for now. I think it's finished, though this decision is often the most difficult one to make. Starting a new piece is often fretful, I'm addled by choice and fearful that I've made the wrong decision, from then on, if the decision was right, there are ups and downs, sometimes a horrible feeling of panic grips my throat and either makes it difficult for me to keep still (I'm up and down like a Yoyo, fetching a can of pop from the fridge, feasting on my fingernails), or else I freeze and can only sit looking at what I've done. A radio feature becomes so fascinating that I have to turn it up and give it my whole attention, though of course, my eyes are drawn back to the sticky surface of my drawing.


All that's over for this piece, I think. I've decided to leave the white areas of the foreground tree and the two trees at the extreme left and right of the composition white, for a breathing space, compositional silence.

Someone once told me when I was a student that it can be wise to juxtapose a detailed or highly defined area of work with an area that is more loosely worked. In those days my work tended to be abstract or abstracted, but I'm begining to realise how valuable this piece of advice was and how I should bear it in mind when bringing a piece of figurative work to a conclusion.

I'm going to indulge myself now in a Quorn sandwich (garnished with pickled cabbage with a side order of mixed pickles - a feast as welded to Christmas for me as Santa Claus and Handel).

Lines...

...and a blot on the landscape...


Finally, I wish whoever reads my final blog posting for 2009 a very HAPPY NEW YEAR.

A VERY INTERESTING JOURNEY

I'm working hard trying to finish a drawing I began about 4 weeks ago, pretty much straight after finishing 'Running Away', which I posted in an earlier blog. I've got an aim in mind, but I don't know whether anything will come of it yet. 2009 has been a mixed bag for me, of changes of direction, surprise successes and disappointments. The disappointments, of course, leave the longest taste. At least for someone with my 'glass half empty' frame of mind.

I'm really pleased with my daylight lamp though, it's allowed me to work pretty intensely through this dark and dreary December day, the sunlight has hardly managed to pierce the raindrops and the grey clouds at all. My eyes have been surprisingly resilient these past couple of days, I've found my nose almost resting on the page again as I get drawn into my drawing, something that doesn't happen so often these days. Not through lack of concentration (though concentration is sometimes a problem) but because of my changing eyesight. It's odd though, it doesn't seem to just get worse, but some days it's better again. I don't know why that should be. But on the good days, I'm not going to complain.

Anyway, here's a picture of the chaotic little corner of what used to be my brother's bedroom, it's where I've been working this morning and even with the heating on it's so cold that I’ve had to pad myself up with sweater, chunky cardigan and body warmer. Our house is such a cold place in the winter.


I think this drawing is the most intensely worked piece I've ever done, I find myself falling into a fugue state while working on it, one day I think I might just disappear into one of my drawings. That should be a very interesting journey.