DRIP DRIP DRIP

As I suspected last week when I finished PW PW 2001 I've now slumped into a state of picture limbo. I've been going through my photographs and making drawings from the PC screen, and I've planned a drawing which I've stretched the paper for, prepared the paper with a wash of gesso and white gouache, but I still feel limbo-fied.

I've had my Long Mossy Tree drawing professionally framed. It's the first time I've ever had this done (apart from a competition I came second in when I was 18, then my artwork was framed as part of my award). The fee was reasonable and it was done within a week by The Framer's Gallery in Wolverhampton.


But my main artistic aim at the moment is to settle my fractious brain. I've picked up a few old pieces and am attempting to resuscitate them...







...but really I need to get stuck into something I can feel whole heartedly obsessed with. I'm no good at multi-tasking, despite all I hear about how 'women' are supposed to be. I can juggle if I need to, most people can, but I'm happiest bedding down with one task and throwing my all into it. That's when I'm most comfortable.


Enjoying listening to Radio 7's repeats of Baldi, they're intelligent and entertaining detective stories, but what I really love about them is David Threlfall's voice which has a soothing quality that makes me feel quite comforted.

Two Exhibitions, One Movie and a Hill Fort

I handed my 2 pictures in yesterday for the West Midlands Open, a quick and efficient process. The guy who took my pictures kindly positioned 2 rubber cushions to protect the bottom of my picture frames, which I thought was a very thoughtful touch. When I was there someone was delivering an enormous piece with the aid of a horse trailer! The huge Gas Hall was already teeming with pieces, I'm really looking forward to seeing this exhibition.


Afterwards G and me went to see the good looking but pretty vacant Wolfman. The whole thing dripped with Hammer Horror style, it was a veritable homage, but I've never seen anything as funny as the fight between the 2 werewolves at the end.

We also managed to fit in a trip to the Ikon where we joined a host of other art spectators shuffling around in the darkness for the film installation On the Movement of the Fried Egg and Other Astronomical Bodies. To be honest I didn't really get a lot out of this, though it was amusing to see how people cope with being plunged into darkness where we shuffled, edged, minced and drifted around like 'other astronomical bodies'.

I enjoyed Clare Rojas's exhibition We They, We They, particularly the installation upstairs in which Clare Rojas's bright folky images are collaged together on the walls to create an effect that reminded me of a chapel or church. In another room a multitude of small folky pieces were hung from cloak pegs. Some of these are illustrations to her children's book 'Pidgy' a copy of which you can see in the Resource Room. The artist’s folk-art embellished banjos which hang from the walls of the Tower Room are an amusing, quirky touch.



The photos on this page are all from today's jaunt to Old Oswestry Hill Fort in Shropshire, which looked beautiful in the snow. We had intended to visit Chirk Castle for the snowdrops but adverse weather conditions meant this had to be cancelled. We did however catch a glimpse of Wales under snow in all its dour, frowning beauty.

SLOW MO

I'm really trying to finish PW PW 2001, probably trying too hard to finish it if i'm honest, but I have another deadline I want to make and I'm aware that within a few weeks my time will be constrained by my having taken a second part-time job.

The more I think about developing my artwork (I haven't really attacked it with anything like this much serious intent for many, many years) I realise how many shortcomings I have - I'm embarrassed at how naive I still am about the business side of art, I'm still like a dog with a bone, running with my creativity locked between gritted teeth hoping the rest of the world doesn't catch up with me and take my precious thing away.

Last night I made a few notes on my pocket pc about where I'm going with my grafitti drawings. I've taken photographs of grafitti (on walls, statues, trees) for years now, I've kept meaning to do 'something' with them, but it wasn't until about 5 years ago that I made my first grafitti tree drawing and last year when I began to develop this further. I'm really so slow at developing anything, despite the effort and the time I put into things I just seem to function at a very slow creative metabolic rate (if that makes sense). I must always have been this way, because I remember my art teacher, Mr Trafford, saying something along the lines of me being a slow developer, and my English Lit' teacher (Miss Warren) saying this also. I guess it's part of my psychology. I'm a slow mo.

Been laughing at the Goons while I worked this morning and still haunted by images and themes from the consistently wonderful Mad Men, which is one of the few things I watch religiously on television. Mad Men is perfect on every level -visually, dramatically, and certainly the writing is pure bliss managing to incorporate drama, plot intrigue, subtlety and depth of character, psychology and social change. It's pure art.


Roots & grafitti
What/who we are, what we come from, how we attempt to make our mark/express ourselves
The tangible natural/physical world
The intangible world of aspiration

YOU'RE BEING FRAMED

Today I delivered my long mossy tree drawing to a picture framer. I've never had a picture professionally framed before as I've managed to find ready made frames fairly cheaply for my drawings, but this latest drawing is such an eccentric size I just can't find one 'off the peg'. It'll be ready in about 10 days, hopefully in time for the deadline I have in mind for it.

I've got to deliver my 2 pieces for the West Midlands Open this weekend. The largest of the two is almost A1 in size, so I had to dig out my old A1 folio, which I haven't used for mmmmm years. I had a surprise when I opened it, as this drawing was taped to the inside.


I think I made this drawing in about 1995 or 6. I hadn't made any drawings for some time, and then there was a space of several years following this date before I began to make my pen and ink drawings. It's a (rather flattering) self-portrait drawn in charcoal and Conte crayon. I've made quite a few self-portraits over the years ever since my teenage years, partly because I always used to enjoy drawing people, people interested me, but I knew so few people and I was (am) shy so finding subjects has always been difficult for me. It's always been the usual suspects for me I'm afraid, my parents or myself.


These pieces are from the period 1988 - 1990. During 1988-89 I worked in our veranda whilst subsisting on an Enterprise Allowance Scheme as a Fine Artist. Thinking about it now my naiveté (stupidity I would even go as far as calling it) astounds me. I had no idea what I wanted to do with these pieces. I was like a dog running with a bone. I was an artist and that was all that mattered.




I wonder now if I'm really any more savvy or 'grown up' despite being 20 years older. Maybe I just haven't got that gene.


I don't remember when this last piece was done, but it looks so lame to me. I don't know why I kept it. It's gone now, anyway.

SNOWDROP WEEKEND

It's been a snowdrop weekend for me and G, yesterday we drove to Dudmaston and today the lovely Colesbourne Park Gardens in the Cotswolds. Colesbourne Park is a private garden famous for its snowdrops, with many, many varieties both on display and for sale. Some of these are rare and costly, the most expensive snowdrops on sale there cost £40! The garden featured on Gardener's Question Time on Friday, when Pippa Greenwood visited. They also offer snowdrop study days, which are very popular. The gardens, which donate money raised from the open days to charity, are open from the last week of January to the end of February, which is the main snowdrop season.


On the way back we took a diversion to visit Notgrove Long Barrow, an English Heritage site which lies beside the busy A436. The Cotswolds is full of these ancient sites, many of which are open to view for free courtesy of English Heritage and Gloucestershire County Council. Although there's nothing spectacular about Notgrove Long Barrow you can clearly see the busy network of interconnecting chambers beneath the undulating earth and it's possible to catch a moment of stillness and awe at the age of this site, the fact that it has survived all these centuries, and that for just a few minutes it's possible to connect across the centuries with a past civilisation.



The second of my Tete-A-Tete drawings. Nothing much has happened to my bulbs yet, mysteriously dormant in their little portion of earth.

TETE A TETE

I haven't had such a fruitful day today, so I'm consoling myself by devouring the remainder of my Christmas Maltesers. I love the box design, which is beautifully festive. I think it was the same design they used last year. I wish I could think of a reason to hold onto the box when the last Malteser has gone, but I can't think of a use for it.


The problem with today was I just couldn't empty my head of various worries, obsessions and hassles enough to concentrate on my drawing. I know I'm trying to squash too much into my days before my time becomes 'challenged' by other commitments, I'm beginning to feel desperate and this is NOT good for my creative work.

I've made an error in judgement with this drawing. I've inadvertently slotted an extra foot or so into the height of the tree and now everything at the bottom is stretched so it throws all of the perspective out. Maybe I could blame it on my astigmatism, like certain experts do for El Greco?


Because I wasn't too happy with my drawing I flailed around the rest of the afternoon feeling lost. I finally finished messing up a piece I started a few weeks ago (another failed experiment) and was so disgusted with the results that it's now nestling in a textural heap at the bottom of my waste paper bin.


Then I dug out this coloured pencil piece I began late last year. I liked it at the time actually, but then a rejection of a coloured pencil drawing winded me of my confidence and I haven't had the courage to go back to coloured pencil since. I'm experimenting now with adding pen and ink to the colour. And then a bit of colour back to the pen and ink. I don't know how it'll turn out. Might join the other thing in the bin, who knows?



Yesterday was better. In a fit of Springful thinking I bought a 99p pot of 'Tete-a-Tete' daffodils from M&S and began drawing them. This is what I produced last night.


The drawing took a couple of hours to do (why do I work so slowly?) with a 45 intermission for the latest episode of Mad Men. Which is as glorious as ever.


My last Maltseser!

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.