Travelling sketchbooks - poetry in fingers of frost

The sketchbook pages I received from V crawled out and off her pages at me. White fingers of seaweed or coral on a reef or a beach. White fingers....

That's what they seemed to say to me and soon, just hours later, I was back with a favourite poem, the World War I poem, Exposure by Wilfred Owen - a searing account of soldiers being killed by the 'nothing happens' and the winter weather of war, not by fighting, and of being shut out even of the warmth of memories of home.

Here is a link to it. Not only is it a very moving and thought-provoking poem, but Owen's hugely creative use of language is marvellous.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/exposure-2/

I was particularly fixated on the final stanza, with the finality of the fingers of frost working on the soldiers with the inevitable result:

To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us, 

Shrivelling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp. 

The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp, 

Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, 

But nothing happens. 

So as this was what had wormed its way out of my head, I rather rashly decided to depict the early-morning frosted faces of the soldiers who had died in the night on the battlefield, not of their wounds, but of the cold.

First of all I used my gelli plate to create the blues and greys of a frosty morning landscape. Then I used simple adigraf cut-outs to create some blasted, blackened trees and jabbed on some lines with paint dipped in the edge of an old credit card to give a sense of fences and wires. Then I used some adigraf mask shapes to indicate the stricken soldiers and finally I made free with silvery and glittery paint to suggest frost.

Well in fact finally I added the last verse of the poem. It's hard to read, but it's important to me that the horror of it isn't ducked.

Travelling sketchbooks - bottled up inside

This month I struggled a bit. E passed on a beautifully-drawn image of the oceans full of life, but blighted by microbeads. She was really cross about it. She had drawn schools of dolphins and shoals of fish, gambolling playfully, but carrying their ultimately deadly, man-made poison innocently inside. Very serious, and difficult to move on in any trivial way I felt.

What did it make me think of? Tubes, tubes full of spherical objects. Tubes blocked up with things. Here is my page of notes. It goes off in quite a few directions, but I suppose that's the point of a brain dump.

Then I started to focus on the things we don't or perhaps can't say that are trapped or stuck inside us.

 

 

Words jammed in our throats, feelings that we perhaps never even dare to put words to. And so I thought about a way of showing this visually; how the conscious or unconscious might be somehow embodied.

I suppose it naturally seemed red to me, our insides, both physical and symbolic. The background is layered tissue paper glued down with matt medium. I spent a while jotting down phrases that I thought might be difficult or impossible to say, not all negative by any means; things that might just be left unsaid, particularly to people who matter to us.

First I laid the phrases out like precious seams emerging from the geological strata of our bodies, then I tried tubes. I encased this very personal treasure in gold and studded it with 'jewels', partly because I was inspired by the Saxon artefacts at the Ashmolean in Oxford, where I spent a happy hour recently looking at garnet-studded gold dragged out of ploughed fields all over Britain, before it even was Britain, and it seemed to fit both metaphorically and visually. I first outlined the 'tubes' using gold acrylic paint and then beefed it up a lot by using Gilding Flakes in Variegated Red by lovecrafts.com. The flakes are stuck on using Gilding Glue, also by lovecrafts.com and it's worth looking on YouTube for information about using both of these. I do think the gold is particularly rich looking.

In the sketchbook that I passed on, I wanted to create a form that looked vaguely like lungs, the organs that keep us alive - life-giving tubes that might get blocked. I do think that, like not being able to breathe if something is blocking our lungs, if we don't find a way to nourish ourselves and our relationships by finding a way to say some of the things that we don't say, we do at the very least live a little less.

Easter crafting 2016 - quirky felt rabbit decorations

When you have a group of mum friends and their daughters keen to do a bit of Easter crafting, what can you do?

Make it an excuse to invite them all round to make felt bunny ornaments, of course.

This is now the third Easter that we've done it. I really hope the kids don't lose interest for a good few years yet. On the other hand, nothing to say that the big girls can't carry on....

Travelling sketchbooks - misty mornings

As the year progresses, it's very chilly in the morning, but the extremely mild winter has meant a riot of early flowering bulbs. Daffodils, crocus, primroses; I wonder what will be left for April..

Nevertheless, misty mornings remain and my daily trips out of the countryside towards the metropolis mean undulating landscape laid out below the winding road and, if conditions are right, banks of low-lying mist, sometimes brushed with gentle early sunbeams touching treetops across the valley.

This must have been just below the surface of my conscious mind when I got the recent travelling sketchbook.

B, who loves whimsicality had gifted me pages of Rapunzel's flowing hair with witches clutter stuck into it. It curled up and down the pages pushing itself into every nook and cranny!

I started to think about other things that swirled atmospherically, that might mean something to me:  wisps of bonfire smoke rising in a helix, closely intertwined snakes and rather more ethereally, the morning mist, settled in layers in the stark winter valley bottom close by.

So first I did a quick sketch coloured with my Inktense pencils, the first remembered impressions indicating where I might be headed.

Then I decided that watery coloured paper might be quite nice with white spaces for the low-lying cloud. I cut random landscape-ish strips of cartridge paper and sloshed it with the dying embers of watercolour paint from the unwashed mixing trays in my palette to give graduated colour. The lumps and bumps are supposed to give a nod to trees and other shapes hardly emerging from the landscape.

 

Then I had a go with paint sample strips, cutting them up and reassembling them and then dabbing them with gesso 'mist'. Hmm..not so successful that one.

 

So I went back to more slosh-coloured paper. The speckles are residual paint from the undersheets that I was working on and I liked the effect so I left it.

This was in the travelling sketchbook that I had started and that I will get back at the end. We all got our 'own' sketchbooks back on this pass. I wondered if this idea had been too simple, but I liked the idea that I would at some point have the original back. That seemed a good enough reason to conclude that, simple or not, it was the right piece to pass on.

Travelling sketchbook - murder!

This month I received a lovely vibrant drawing of a kingfisher and a series of bird silhouettes of different species in shiny graphite - the types of shapes that you might see in a bird identification book.

As usual, a day or so for it all to percolate..

Pretty soon, in my head the birds swirled over me, crows, rooks cawing, shapes against the sky. Winter in the woods. Night was falling. The wings were huge in my face.

A murder of crows....

I don't know, so many of these subjects seem to make me reach for something dark. Something with a twist of foreboding... But then I think, if that's what is there, that is what I should grasp. If this exercise is to be meaningful at all, it needs to tap into something real in me. That's its best chance of working, of feeling genuine and somehow 'connected'.

I was drawn to try to recreate that trepidation of crow shapes, wheeling ever closer against a darkening sky.

First a background.

I had sprayed some Brusho Shimmer Spray onto some sketchbook pages for what had seemed a totally random reason (as in, I found the bottles in the cupboard), but I could see how shadowy wing shapes would work well on such a sparkly background. A background reminiscent of a starlit sky.

 

I needed a darker canvas for the depth of the night sky and a red tinge at the bottom of the page suggesting something diabolical, so I shook up a couple of Procion MX colours into spray bottles to add to the mix...

Next I went onto Google Images, to get some crow and wing shapes to use as templates and cut them out in a variety of fairly matt papers, to give a decent contrast with my dark but sparkly sky. Then I had fun placing them to try and trade off the shapes being distinguishable one from the other, but also seeming rather claustrophobic. I tried to do this by using different sizes of birds and wings sections.

(I did wonder about having a pair of supine legs coming into the picture, 'stage bottom', but it seemed a bit over the top - ha!)

Translating this onto the landscape-oriented travelling sketchbook necessitated a bit of jiggery-pokery to make the composition work and all that spraying did mean that I got some dye on the previous page (eek!), but this is what I am passing on to the next person.

Travelling sketchbook - beach treasure from Carrick

The sketchbook pages that I was gifted this month riffed off a lovely purple. A royal purple. An incredibly expensive purple, Tyrian purple, a mucous secretion from a humble snail.

I had read about this in Victoria Finlay's wonderful book, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. So I started to think about shells and colour. My favourite chapter in the same book had been about the harvesting of lapis lazuli from mysterious caves in remote Afghanistan. We were off to Carrick, in Dumfries and Galloway for New Year and my thoughts were dragged off to the blue hues of the mussel shells that pile up on the beaches there, washed in on rough tides or deposited by gulls after a good feed.

When I looked closely at the real thing, the detail of their patterns amazed me, and I recorded their shapes and colours.

 I tried to use some Transfer Artist Paper to print some of my photographs of shell patterns onto paper, so that I could use them as part of a beach collage, but the printer decided to smear ink all over itself and not on the TAP (what did I do wrong,??), so I was left with no more than a couple of quite atmospheric textural smudges that I ironed onto my paper anyway (see lower picture above), that looked a bit like the kind of silt that gets washed up on beaches.

So I had to find something else to collage mussel shapes from and, surprise, surprise, some Gelli plate cast-offs came galloping to the fore again. Yet another reminder never to throw anything vaguely half-decent away...

I wanted to show the shine of a beach in the low sun of a winter afternoon so I experimented with watercolours overlaid with various pearlescent paints and glitters, to see which sparkled most convincingly and ended up with an amalgam of silvers and golds that seemed to work.

If in doubt, I'm trying to remember to have a good old splash about, as long as it's in my 'back book'. After all, that's what it's for. Not only am I not committed to the final piece, but it gives me my workings in a place that I can annotate.

So the piece that I'm passing on is a landscape version of my back book piece, my take on a chilly afternoon in the January sunshine, beachcombing, finding treasure.

Dumfries and Galloway was flooded over New Year.

It was never clear whether we would be marooned each morning that we woke up. But Carrick's completely unspoiled, windswept and beautiful beach never ceased to be an inspiration.

Travelling sketchbook - chomping fieldfares & Mark Hearld:

Again from M, I received a lovely couple of pages of very evocative feather designs and I was immediately off into the realm of birds again.

I spend the summer fervently hoping that our crab apple tree would have lots of pendulous ripe red fruits, as come winter, migrating fieldfares take up residence in from the fields on the very coldest of days and sit there until they've greedily chomped through the lot! Usually the tree is finally bare just after Christmas.

A December feather subject could not have come and gone without these characters making it onto my sketchbook pages.

As I thought about portly birds in wintery treetops, I recalled that the wonderful Mark Hearld has lots of work involving birds and the landscape and so I turned to his gorgeously produced book, called Mark Hearld's Work Book, to reacquaint myself with his subjects and just how he puts them together for maximum effect. The more I looked, the cleverer I realised he is.

Mark Hearld

For example, as above, I love the way the main subject takes your eye, despite all the other seemingly busy competing elements. The way your eye travels round the picture, taking everything in. The delightful positive and negative elements, just thrown in so you hardly notice them unless you look carefully, but which add so much richness to the whole. It was thrilling to keep looking.

What could I possibly learn when I was just dipping in and out? The more I looked the more I realised that something so apparently effortless is anything but. Of course.

And the above is a print, so doesn't even take account of Mark's frequent use of very varied collaged elements that I always find so exciting.

Anyway, back to my fieldfares. I had a bit of a draw of one and in my sketchbook had a little 'first thought' at a composition.

 

In fact I realised that a 'Mark Hearld' was out of the question. I just didn't have the skill to combine anything like as many elements. So I decided to keep it simple and anyway, I had started snipping tree branches out of a discarded gelli plate print that had just got too dark, but which I couldn't quite bear to throw away. You know the story..

And I quite liked the emerging texture, with bronze lights that I hadn't even considered, until there they suddenly were. I laid them out.

And I realised that with a gentle background, a cheeky fieldfare and some berries, that would be what I wanted. That would be enough.

This is what I passed on to the next person.

The background was just some watercolour swirling, using a couple of colours. After some further immersion into the World of Hearld, the fieldfare was collaged from scraps following my earlier sketch, the breast was a paper leftover with some Inktense pencil marks, some of the marks made into dampened paper. The eye was a couple of glued-on sequins, so that it had a catchlight. And the berries were plops of vibrant watercolour.

It's amazing just how much thinking and mulling I do to get to a pretty simple result. But I think for me it's all about gentle visual problem-solving, play, which takes some pressure off.

Travelling sketchbook - little green apples

The next travelling sketchbook pages I received were a marvellous confection of silver and golden apples and a Yeats poem to match from M.

Our own apple trees were already spilling fruit from a hugely plentiful summer and as we picked and crushed and bottled, I thought about how much the crop changes throughout the year and the progression of gorgeous colours as it all matures and ripens and....drops.

I don't know why, but I liked the idea of colour spilling over edges when I started. Maybe that freshness got a bit lost.

But again I started with texture. I built up some Liquitex Matte Gel, but it took a lot of layers before it got anything like yummy enough with a few peaks and troughs. I was intending to draw with Inktense pencils over the top and then swirl around some water, to let it settle in valleys, so I did need the odd valley! It also required a few layers of gesso over the top to make it interesting enough.

This was my first attempt.

Nice textures, but it did all look a bit bare. I suddenly remembered my trusty stack of paper napkins and wondered about introducing some background colour (I collaged on just the top layer of 3- or 4-ply napkins, pasted on with acrylic medium, which you can then work over with other paints, pencils etc).

I wanted to echo the 'through the seasons' look of the apples.

This was what I passed on to the next person.

Travelling sketchbook - a bubblewrap special

Next, I received an image of a raptor with a very beady eye from E in the Travelling Sketchbook circus.

That eye transfixed me and the tissue paper-layered feathers made me think first of a caveman's pelt.
Ooh, some kind of deep texture.

Then at home I spied some bubblewrap, just hangin'....with sunlight glinting through it, and I was off on eskimos and ice. Amazing what connections our brains make. Just catching those micro thoughts as they speed past is the tricky bit, I think.

So I started to play.

The bubblewrap looked like bubbles in frozen ice. Particularly with some marbled paper that I once did, tucked behind it.

The 'pools' are some Procion MX dyed paper. It can give such lovely deep colour.

Big bubblewrap or small....? In many ways, I liked the big bubbles better as they seemed less uniform and therefore had more energy. But they really bulked out the sketchbook (curses!).

I realised that all that ice was making me feel a bit scared and I tracked it to a feeling of nagging fear at being trapped.

I added some eyes. Maybe they were always in my mind from my first response to the bird that came my way as my inspiration image. I got even more scared when I saw that little face, trapped not far, but in the end too far from the waterhole.

I needed something a bit gentler colourwise though, I thought. So I dialled back on the marbled paper to a calmer selection of colours.

But those terrified eyes still stared from under the thick, unyielding ice.....