Well, last week I simply forgot to post this. I did the same with my Binky McKee illustration and design blog, I left both posts in drafts and forgot to publish, so I backdated it today. I was most interested in these leftover pieces of cutout template shapes, strewn across a piece of paper - they really do look like a strange calligraphy.

Another six from the series of Indian frame rubbings. No new work this week, but I find myself thinking a lot about the templates works, especially in the night in that state of half dreaming. They keep appearing to me with figures in them - yes, people! - something I haven't worked with for years. I am interested in the idea and it makes perfect sense in the wee hours, but when I am fully awake the images slip away as soon as I have conjured them in my mind. I guess the only thing to do is try it one day and see what happens.

A number of warm, sunny days last week got me out into the garden, working in my pop-up tent. It fills up rapidly with art materials, papers, tools, brushes, pencils, pens and jars of ink and is all rather precarious. The wind at one point was flapping the tent walls so hard the whole tent was leaning and threatening to spill my water jar. At one point the jar of ink fell over, luckily inside an old, thick-walled leather satchel which has seen it all in terms of art material accidents - the lid wasn't on properly, and ink spilled into the corner of the bag in a puddle, strangely enough in exactly the same place which bore a stain from a similar accident years ago. Such hindrances I took in my stride - they go hand in hand with working in a tent, and I managed to power through a lot of work making frottage prints of two wooden Indian frames as a basis for riffing on the templates theme.

After the frame prints I made monotype drawings of some of the templates. Here are some of the templates cut out and thrown down on a piece of paper, ready to use. I thought they looked like a strange alphabet, flying up in the wind to form words.
By the end of the day, the remaining ink on the glass palette not only bore the residue of beautiful marks but had the perfect consistency to make monotype drawings.

It's my birthday today, and I opened an Etsy shop as a gift to myself - at long last! I will be stocking it gradually with watercolours, including these 6 from the week. When I have enough listings to make it interesting, I'll link to it from this blog.
In the mean time, I hope everyone enjoys the bank holiday weekend in lockdown!

I discovered a liveliness in the work this week, and was surprised when I began to recognise work from my past coming through. I am going to hark back to my days at Gray's in Aberdeen again, because something in the distribution of weight, tone, shapes and marks goes right back to then. Around 1983 we had a class trip out west to sketch the sea and mountains (I think to Tighnabruaich, I may be wrong). Following on from the monotype landcapes I talked about previously, I had begun to develop landscape paintings using lots of inky splotches and dark areas crossed by even darker spots and lines, but on that trip it really came together. Unfortunately I can't find any of those now, but I did refer to them a few years ago in a large sketch book, where for three pages I made little drawings of fruits using every mark I could imagine and a number of tools to make them, including home made quills from bird feathers, and my finger tips. I haven't worked this way for ages, and I am really enjoying it - it's weird how some things just never go away.

These fruits were ideas to decorate ceramics.