Hopefully lost

At last Frou Frou is showing some signs of life. Just a couple of times this evening and this morning, when I worked for about 20 minutes before catching the train to work, I lost myself in the drawing. Losing myself in a drawing is a good sign.


My new drawing is a deliberately simple affair. I want there to be lots of lush dark crosshatching involved, and the faintest shimmer of stippled light on still water. I want there to be more drama than detail, and more atmosphere than description. It will, in fact, be a more romantic (with a subscript r) affair than Frou Frou, which is hyper-lucid with a kind of waking dream (Richard Dadd) kind of look to it.

Tonight, by the way, I've been listening to a wonderful new Big Country compilation, passionate, melancholy, soulful and melodic in a big way.

Drawing in - the nights

In a way I'm relieved that the nights are begining to draw in, even though they do so with remarkable speed. 7.30 sunset tonight, far too early.

And yet, this summer especially the garden has held me ransom. The hours I've spent seeing to our flowers, the tomato plants (they're heavy with tomatoes now, I don't know what to do with them. I don't even like tomatoes!), reading, sitting in the sunshine, snatching it when I can. And time, being so precious this year, as it was last year, nudges me further into obsession. This year more than any year I've felt almost driven to soak up as much of what passes for fresh air round here, earlier in the summer I sat out as long as I could until our solar lights came on, lighting up the garden path like a runway (Santa stop here!)

Tonight, a bumble bee, heavy with pollen or perhaps just tired out at the end of summer, has fallen asleep on the dropping sunflower near the veranda. I know how it feels. Sated on summer.

So now, the nights are drawing in, and I am freed to sit under the daylight lamp and work at my drawings. My neglected craft.


I think I began this drawing as much to keep chugging away at something as with any real intention at art. And it's been extremely slow progress, extremely frustrating. At least now I'm covering paper, but I don't know if I'm finding a pattern yet. I don't know if I will.

Last night I began a new drawing. A refreshingly simple subject, unemcumbered by detail. Or at least, keep the detail to a small area and surround it with painterly light and shade, pen and ink. Plus the pen glides more comfortably over the yellow Ingres paper than it does over the white watercolour paper. And at this moment I crave comfort.


I got a chance to give a first listen to one of my Christmas presents this evening. The National's Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. Gorgeous.

Transparently obvious

I made a bit of a boob with my transparency labels. I bought laser ones instead of inkjet (if they do them, that is). Result:- Labels that never dry.

Which is annoying because they weren't exactly cheap. I don't really want to buy another box of film, so I'll probably take my file and film and see if I can get them printed out professionally.


This setback threw me a bit, and I haven't really made as much progress today as I'd liked. I got some of the photographs together that I'd used as reference material and played around with ideas for displaying them with my drawings.

Including these little easels made from sticks and string.


I liked them at first, but I'm not sure now. They're a bit Blair Witch maybe.

Preparation

I've mounted most of the pieces I hope to exhibit at the library. Although it's not until the end of November, and it's only a very small exhibition (I'd have trouble filling more wall space - makes me realise how precious these pieces are for me, as they represent such a huge portion of my life) I won't rest until I have everything ready and safely tucked away in a folder. Hopefully I can just transport it to the library and assemble it in the display cases, nerves always makes me clumsy (or more clumsy than usual, which is really saying something), and I want it to be a swift operation. Hopefully with no mishaps!

It's hard finding the space to mount work though, I've spent most of today crouched on the floor upstairs, in the tiny space where I work or out on the landing, which is so dark I had to take the daylight lamp out there so I could see where mounting card ended and fingers began!


I've just a couple more pieces to mount now, then hopefully I'll start typesetting and printing out labels. I'm hoping to print these onto acetate and attach them to the mounts. Less to fiddle with when I come to putting them up. And hopefully it will look nice too.

I've spent huge portions of today listening to radio comedy, the Count Arthur cd I had for my birthday - absolutely hilarious, and a really nice trip through time courtesy of Bill Oddie, Comedy Controller, on Radio 4 Extra. Great to hear ITMA, I haven't heard much of this series, and I feel I'm locked out of a lot of it as it's the kind of thing you had to be there first time round to get, but there are some pretty sharp bits still. And it was interesting hearing Hattie Jacques in an early role as a cake loving schoolgirl. I've an interest in ITMA as the novel I was writing last year (and a few years previous) was set partly in 1947 and the world of radio comedy, as well as the music hall. One thing about this exhibition, one part of my strategy at least, is that I'm hoping that I can use it as a kind of creative catalyst. I have to get back into my creative work in some way, and ideally on the other side of this exhibition I would like to produce new visual work and also, maybe, see my way to completing my novel.

Fingers crossed.

I've set a date for my small exhibition. It will begin on Monday 21 November and end on Saturday 10th December 2011. As the exhibition will be in 2 glass cases on the first floor of the library, I'm hoping to use the split in order to theme my exhibition around firstly current work, and secondly, as a kind of retrospective of how my pen and ink work has developed over the past 10 years. Looking back at my older pieces now I had forgotten how small I began back in 2000, when my work was then mainly done in A5 sketchbooks. They seemed to take forever to do, and the nibs I used were the finest kind, I didn't begin to use a variety of nibs until 2005 when I began to experiment with larger pieces.

Those early drawings, like this exhibition, were exercises in self-confidence building. I find that confidence is like the weather; changeable and subject to uncontrollable circumstances. The mind, like meteorological forces, is unpredictable and sensitive.

Meanwhile the rain beats desultory time on our neighbour’s conservatory. My bookmark marches in sad fascination through Douglas Botting's biography of Gavin Maxwell. It's a strange biography - both sympathetic, admiring, and at the same time it never flinches from baring the man warts and all. I'm three quarter's through it, hooked. I know it ends badly, but I can't stop reading.

Plans

I'm planning a small exhibition of my artwork at the library where I work. The library is a Carnegie library, a beautiful building with a particularly striking entrance hall where a marble staircase spirals gracefully up to the first floor and the imposing double glass cases which people can hire (for free). I've seen all kinds of things exhibited here, from displays of local artists' work and photography groups, to origami and collectable cigarette cards.

I can never resist looking up every time I climb the stairs to the first floor, because the domed ceiling with its round skylight is wonderful. Wolverhampton Central library is a gem of a building.


Anyway, I'm hopefully putting together a small exhibition of my artwork in these cases, later this year all being well, when the extensive work that's been going on at the library since last November is finally completed. I've begun by planning out the space, as I hope to present my pieces mounted but not framed. I've begun doing this by measuring out with string an equivalent space to the glass cases in the back garden, then laying out sheets of paper cut roughly to the size of my drawings within them.


I know this looks eccentric, but it helps me work out whether I've got enough pieces to fill the cases. The left hand case is going to be my most recent work, basically themed around my most recent exploration of a motif - trees. The right hand case is older work, with exception of the furthest right hand piece, which will be my as yet unfinished drawing Frou Frou. The older work pretty much represents the last 10 years of my visual artwork. I will exhibit the smallest pieces, which were the first drawings I made when I began to practice my visual art again, about 10 years ago now.

I'm hoping to approach this small thing as profesionally as possible. Hope nothing goes wrong. Fingers crossed.

Bright Water

I have developed a very strange twitch in my right eye, I've had it since last Thursday. Probably I'm just a bit tired at the moment, but it's uncomfortable.

So today, apart from continuing with the home repairs that have gobbled up the last few weeks of my life (it feels like forever) I have been dashing into the garden between showers to sit in the warm and windy outdoors reading a biography of Gavin Maxwell I borrowed from the library, which is totally fascinating.

It's a sign that I've managed to find a little bit of space this week, that ideas have started to bubble up again. But they are frenzied kind of ideas, so many of them, so various, that I become paralized by choice. So while I'm happy that my creativity hasn't died totally, I am uncomfortable as I usually am when the dearth becomes a kind of creative death as I am plunged into a frustrated impasse.

I've managed to do about half an hour's work on my drawing. This is the first time I've touched it since my last blog entry on the subject. I'm struggling with enthusiasm for it, but I must finish it over the next few weeks, I can't give in to the impulse to let another thing go.

Googling Gavin Maxwell I found this lovely blog. Wish I could take it outside with me to read, or to work, where I will be tommorow, for my brief commute. It makes me yearn to be in Scotland again. Really does.