Sketchbook - autumn extra

Autumn is lasting for ever. The colour changes are in slo-mo and drinking it all in is so easy. You couldn't possibly miss it. So my sketchbooks have had one or two more splashings and jottings, aided by a lovely poem that I found:

---------------------------------------
Counting-Out Rhyme (Edna St Vincent Millay)

Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
    Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
    Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
    Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
    Twig of willow.

-------------------------------------------------

Here are a couple of recent pages from my sketchbook inspired by the colours and shapes around us here and the poem above.

Again a layer of watercolour, a layer of coloured napkin or kitchen roll, dyed over time with moppings ups of paint, bits of scrap card, painted and the words of Edna St Vincent Millay, either scappily written by yours truly or put into Wordle (thanks, Margaret).

Sketchbook - autumn sunshine

This is such a lovely in-between time of year: bright and warm, mellow in the shadows, flickering, glinting greens shifting into lemons and rusts. I thought I'd have a little go at collaging the feel of it in my scrappy sketchbook:

I splashed watercolour on one page and then folded two pages together and quickly pulled them apart. I collaged on bits of napkin, kitchen roll, origami paper and the painted ripped remains of corrugated choc croissant packaging (thanks, Waitrose!).

I think this is what's meant by just using your sketchbook and not worrying too much about how glorious the results are. It kind of has the feel of how life is right now...

My kind of lovely

Just come across these two makers. Love them both.  I think I somehow connect with their sense of the eccentric, I suppose with an edge of the macabre.

Sophie Woodrow is in Bristol, so I'll definitely follow her up:
http://sophiewoodrow.co.uk/work/

Mr Finch is in Leeds so that's less likely. Pieces like the bees, below, are actually quite big. http://mynameisfinch.blogspot.co.uk/

Mr Finch sells his pieces on Etsy so I'll be keeping my eyes peeled...

Owls

Why are owls so beguiling? For me, hearing them outside the house in the dark is a tucked-up cosy, secret thrill: 'listen...they're here....'

Peter Doig sprung another surprise: a couple of lovely aquatinted etchings of owls, just dashed off this year. This one is subtitled Boscoe.

Owl (Boscoe) (2013) - Peter Doig

I really liked the fact that he'd structured the thing so differently. Here are my sketches of his two. I couldn't find the right-hand one on the net.

So I scribbled a couple (one 'positive' one 'negative'), much more cliched than PD's.

Then I hacked away at some Adigraf to give me a version, using some linocut tools, below with a tryout.

And here's a finished version. And thanks must also go to Olwyn Pearson, whose work made me realise that a dark print on a bookpage worked really well. Thank you, Olwyn.

Edinburgh - my delights

So, my first visit to the Fringe, staying just outside the city in Dunbar on the east coast.
What made the biggest impressions?

The Peter Doig exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery. Sort of itchy and shimmering at the same time. Lovely vast canvases, dribbles aplenty, very compositional, practically abstract sometimes, and yet very subject-focused too.

What do I mean?

Metropolitain (House of Pictures) (2003-04) - Peter Doig

This picture manages to be both flat (2D-ish squares) and not flat (landscape and a figure with depth). It's happy to mess with your mind. There was lots of this.

Then this: lush paint, loads of it. Standing in front of it, you could feel the heat and the humidity.

Grande Riviere (2001-02) Peter Doig

But the painting that totally blew me away, that I wasn't expecting, was at the City Art Centre, a John Bellany early painting. And then I read that he died on Wednesday, paintbrush in hand, at 71.

The Obsession (1973) - John Bellany

I nearly fell into this painting. It was huge, raw, bitten, phallic. It made me think about the fishermen I had seen in Dunbar that morning, mending their nets by the harbour. The hardscrabble life. In the painting the figures look like weathered standing stones, been there for centuries, part of the sea and sky, ready to be swallowed up by either. Wow. This is why I love paintings.

Lurking...

Always check all telegraph poles. You never know whether juvenile green woodpeckers might be sitting tight, waiting for mum to come back...

These two were sitting quite quietly. No one noticed. Except one person who scuttled off to get her long(ish) lens, papping them out of her bedroom window...

When I first spotted them, mum was there too. I just caught sight of her black moustache, peeping out from behind the pole. Then off she went on her never-ending project of filling two hungry tums.

Getting out there - Sketchbook Challenge

I found the Sketchbook Challenge via a book that I bought at the Royal Academy shop. 

They have a monthly theme and it's just about getting out there and producing....something - anything to keep the creative juices flowing.

This month, this came through

http://uk-mg42.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=di10kfvv5bjf0#mail

The theme was Garden Doodles and, as the sun was shining, the post above did get me out there.

For the top one, I had already prepared the page in my sketchbook, colouring it, sticking on a piece of the inside of an envelope and then knocking it back with gesso. Below, the same, but no envelope. For both, I used Inktense sticks and then water slopped over the top with a big brush.

There is nothing special about these, I know. But it was lovely just to be sitting in the sunshine and drinking in the alliums, geums, and geraniums and responding to the colours.

Hay & music to titillate the middle-aged

So we went off to the Hay Literary Festival, camping as usual. The days were warm the nights were COLD, double bagging required. And for some reason this year, most of my acquisitions were not printed matter but.....African textiles.... Hay is twinned with Timbuktu, which was a very important centre for books and scholarly study in the 14 and 1500s, so pretty appropriate really. But that means that they do their twinning fundraisers at the same time as the Festival, so I brought a bag of African wax printed fabrics and a potato printed tablecloth from Zimbabwe. Gorgeous. I love the simple elements of the elephant tablecloth. Just shows how effective a repetitive pattern can be.

But importantly, for those amongst us who have ceased listening to the charts, and therefore never know what 'new' music to listen to, I would like to offer you Rokia Traore, from Mali, who we saw on the Friday night. She is playing Glastonbury this year. I did wonder how that experience might differ from playing to a load of seated, motionless oldies in Gore-texes and fleece hats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DydY8bHTyg

This was my picture of her from the gig. Looks quite hardcore.

Rokia Traore at Hay, May 2013

The album of hers that I really like is called Tchamantche. It's hypnotic, relaxing.

Otherwise at the Festival, I went human rights-heavy: Hans Blix, two UN guys talking about getting aid to difficult places and blowing the whistle on Darfur. Usually with me it's poets. Not this year. And I saw my hero, Jeremy Bowen. The warzone reporter that I would marry, if I were forced to choose.... I cravenly bought his book so that I could go and ask him a question about US drone attacks on Pakistan (don't ask!).

Colourful & Charismatic

Yesterday saw us up in the Smoke getting exposure to the artier end of the Alpha Male(!)

First up, the perfect exhibition, 18 early Picassos at the Courtauld (until May 27th). For those who like exhibitions on the drive-through side, you could say you'd been, without spending too long there. For those of us who like the total immersion method, you could come up for air before expiring from too many lungfuls of (...my metaphor has defeated me...)

Boy, I like 'em ugly. And the more colourful, the better.

Spanish Dwarf (La Nana) - Picasso (1901)

Picasso was 19 or 20 when he did these! Look at the composition of the Spanish Dancer. Beautifully compacted. At my camera club they would be saying '...you could think about cropping quite a bit off that floor..'

The backgrounds on both are psychedelic....and then delicate Degas ballet legs on the right.

On the picture below, again, loads of skirt. Where does the skirt end and the sofa begin? It's just one huge billow around an indistinct little face.

Spanish Woman - Picasso (1901)

My heart hurt looking at Child with Dove (below left). I was so surprised. I've looked straight past it on so many Christmas cards, only to find the real thing genuinely moving. It's from a private collection. I could only think, 'Will I ever see you again?'.

Child with Dove - Picasso (1901)

Seated Harlequin - Picasso (1901)

And then (right) Seated Harlequin had me with its great composition. A chunk off the top for the wallpaper, a slice out of the side for the table. And through it all, that sinuous body in a flat-plane patterned outfit.

This guy, at 19, was already on his way!

Later we were interlopers at a Balkan event. Goran Bregovic and his gang played at the Royal Festival Hall for us and 2498 people for whom the event meant home. The main man is a cross between Bradley Wiggins and Mick Hucknell. The music is a wild mix of folk music, gypsy music, parpy brass, men's vocals so deep they seem to come from the bowels of the hall and polyphonic women's vocals. It's mad and it works brilliantly.

Early on, there were lots of gorgeous girls with long, thick, dark, glossy hair elegantly dancing with their wrists. Later during some older folk songs, tears were being shed in every row as GB tapped the ache of home.

Just like Picasso, this guy isn't lacking in confidence...  Check the shoes.

Goran Bregovic at the Royal Festival Hall (2013)

Here is a clip of his music. This morning we are a bit tired...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcSTx0frhY8

Monigami!

A few weeks ago, whilst fossicking around on the internet, I found these:

http://www.origamifun.info/gallery/money_faces.php?category=gallery

I'm going to get my tatty old obscure currency out, the grottier the better, to see if inspiration resides within.

I did email the guy to see if he minded me shouting this pic out (!) to my mates, but only got an echoing radio silence. But I was a bit scared when I read his threat below.

No part of this website may be reproduced without specific permission. If you do, we'll track you down and you will fold with the fishes.

Let me count the ways....

We have had a pheasant and one of his purported harem visiting our garden in the last few weeks. He comes, he bashes on our window with his beak and he noisily gobbles up our sunflower hearts. If she's lucky, he shouts to his mate, who then may, just may, also get a look in. She hasn't been around for a couple of days...we wonder if she's 'sitting' somewhere.

I just love the detail of his face - the teeny, tiny red feathers.

Recently I looked out of the window and here he was, thrashing and wallowing in the dirt at the bottom of the garden, looking for all the world as though he was about to expire.....

....only for him to suddenly ruffle up his feathers and flick his wings in the most glorious and energetic dust bath.

This went on for about twenty minutes - near death rolls and twitches and then a sudden series of wonderful, filthy flourishes.

And this little chap is determinedly aerating our lawn early every morning. I've taken these photos through glass and with a 300mm zoom lens, so they're not that sharp, but they'll do for now.

Foxy boxy - Chinese twist boxes

 Well, following our recent class in the village, teaching people how to make Chinese twist boxes and popping them on cards, I thought I would post a few of mine, showing the variety from one simple form.

The box on the first card was made from old music from a charity shop, decorated using a paste paper technique. After folding the diagonals to get the twist in the right place and before I glued it together, I sheared about 1cm off the top of the box with pinking shears, to show the contrast of the back and front of the paper.

The box on the second card was made with scanned Woman's Weekly corset ads from the Sixties. I put ribbons and buttons in the box.

 The three pictures above show a card containing two twist boxes sitting on top of a lower, flatter box (which I didn't manage to get a good photo of). I stencilled the cover using the shape left after I had cut out the petals that I stuck on the twist boxes.

The card immediately below was bit of freehand painting of flowers, using Analinky dye paints and a few 'gems' stuck on. I put some sweet pea seeds in the twist box and it has already gone off into the ether as a birthday card.

The box on the bottom card was made of recycled wrapping paper and I cut bits out of the same paper to create the border. Nothing particularly clever.

These are so simple to do. Thanks again to Ruth Smith, who has done so much work developing the original Chinese thread booklet techniques into something that a mere mortal can manage!

Midsummer Night's Puppets & folding boxes

You may know that there is a production of Midsummer Night's Dream on at Bristol Old Vic, done in collaboration with Handspring, the puppet company involved in the stunningly creative stage production of Warhorse http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za/

How was it? Well it was by no means a seamless collaboration, even a bit clunky in places. But the thinking behind the puppets was always inspiring. Minds had been let fly free. So what if they occasionally alighted on something that didn't quite come off in the actualisation.

At its best, it was thrilling and laugh-out-loud daring. Puck, made up of tools and various bits of kit, materialised and dematerialised, and flew around the stage like an anarchic banshee. And Bottom's transformation into an ass was astoundingly, shockingly imaginative. I imagine if you went round to the house of the designer, it would be a treasure trove of half-made articulations and survivors from the bottom corners of innumerable skips, waiting for their moment in the spotlight.

Midsummer Night's Dream, Bristol Old Vic

 

Like with Amy Macdonald, I found myself looking at the lighting of the stage set. I loved the wooden scenery structure (back right in the photo above) and the way that light played in it.

I am currently fiddling with some folding paper boxes, based off Chinese thread booklets and developed by Ruth Smith. My friend M and I are exploring these for an up and coming playday, using them as elements on cards. The stage lighting gave me some ideas for decoration, although I suspect I shall have to go the whole hog and get out some adigraf (a soft version of lino and brilliant for printing from) to create some motifs of my own, instead of using a bought roller.

 

 

It may be difficult to see the connection between the box and the inspiration. I suppose it's just a spark of an idea that then gets a momentum of its own. And things live that way. (Lining paper dyed with Procion MX dye, pattern rollered on using acrylic paints.)