Blog Archives

26 August: My monoprint plate

26/8/2020

... is a sheet of toughened glass, which my partner B also uses as a surface to muller his paints. He makes his paints by hand and for that purpose he constructed the wooden jig you can see surrounding the glass. This holds the glass steady, and he can put sheets of white paper underneath which can be changed when they get dirty. It is a clever, practical invention which works brilliantly for making monotypes, lucky me! Here it is on my work table, all freshly cleaned after I finished for the day.

I'm going to be busy at the weekend - my beautiful god-daughter (B's daughter, yes it's a bit Fleabag), owner of vegan The Beans Bakery on Instagram, and her fab YouTuber husband Ben are coming to stay for the weekend. We haven't seen Ben for nearly three years, and it's been nearly a year since we saw Molly, as they had both planned an Easter visit which didn't happen because of lockdown. We are all so excited about the weekend!

Next week I will be back on the monotypes and I'll maybe show the glass in action.

Meanwhile, check out Beardo Benjo on You Tube, especially if you are partial to a little spooky horror gaming!

23 August: Monotypes and new work

23/8/2020

Monotype drawings have been a long-term favourite of mine, ever since I learnt the technique in 1981 at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. I began some new work this week, bearing in mind what I was thinking last week about allowing more space for the work, and decided to start with monotypes of my father’s old templates.

It meant (horror of horrors) having to clear out my work space, involving a lot of shifting things around and putting things away to make room for my toughened glass plate on the table, which in turn led to an incredible amount of dusting. A rethink and reorganisation of the work space is a great way to begin a new series of work, though, and I was excited when I could eventually begin! As usual there was the initial panic that nothing would come of it and that I wouldn’t ever be able to make art again, but the best thing is just to start somewhere and get marks onto those scary blank sheets of paper. I love the monotype process so much it it was just a few moments before I was totally absorbed. The marks, accidental and deliberate, are their own inspiration. Below is a detail showing lovely stony textures and pale lines left on the plate by the drawings which happened earlier.

16 August: Into space

16/8/2020

I spent some time photographing details of templates drawings from my diary this week, exploring those passages which use more space. The spaces aren’t exactly negative, being activated by broad, loose brush strokes which offset tighter marks. Their opacity complements semi-transparent areas created with tracing paper; tight marks meet a mist of gestures, so they are apparently being released into mid-air. The sensation is that they might eventually disperse, but there they are fixed in the world of the drawing.
Moving forward, I want to explore giving the drawings more breathing space - and use more colour.

9 August: Efflorescence

9/8/2020

I photographed these crystals - in our scullery sink, of all places. A bleach solution had drained away, leaving a residue which dried into these beautiful crystalline forms. It reminded me of a photo (or possibly a contact print) my Dad used to have lying around; he had made if from of the bottom of a developing tank he used for his photography in the early 1970s. Sadly, that print appears to be lost now. As a child I thought at the time that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had marvelled at the intricacy of the crystals in their feathery forms, for years mistakenly thinking it was a photo of ice on a window.

How could something as mundane as a cleaning product flower so spectacularly? Today, from a yellow plastic Asda container had emerged pale, ephemeral gardens of constellations, skies of wonder, caves of stalactites and stalagmites - a genie in the bottle. Is this a form of efflorescence? I hope so, because in French the word means ‘flowering out’, and that to me is exactly has happened here. As bleach is diluted sodium hydrochloride, I am guessing once most of the water emptied from the sink, the rest evaporated away leaving these beautiful salt crystal deposits.

4 August

4/8/2020

I heard something on the radio yesterday which dug right into my soul. So much so that I sought it out to listen again on radio iPlayer, and copied it out word for word:

Front Line BBCRadio4 aired 3 August 2020 19:15hrs BST
Presented by Kirsty Lang
Author and poet Barbara Kingsolver in conversation on her second collection of poems How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

Barbara Kingsolver
“This poem is about how in a physical way, in a metaphysical way, in a biological way, nothing ever dies. Behold your body, there’s water and there’s minerals; think where it’s gonna go, it’s never gonna be lost; and this is what I told my children when they were small, and asked me what happens when you die. I talked about trees, I talked about soil and minerals and compost and when a tree dies it turns to soil and then another tree grows from it.
“We don’t like to talk about it generally but it’s the same for us and I think it’s a pretty beautiful story, and that’s how we fly, we ultimately evaporate but it’s not an easy thing to think about it, especially in a culture that doesn’t like to think about the finite nature of life and of bodies.”
Kirsty Lang
“I love the idea of me ending up as a leaf and flying into the sky when I die, I find it very positive ...”
Yes, I love that idea, too.

Barbara Kingsolver then read the title poem

“Anything left undone you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles into the hands of a child ...” - wow.

I bought the book on Kindle straight away as hardback isn’t available for a couple of days, but it’s already on my letter to Santa. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but from what I have browsed so far it is a treasure chest filled with similar pearls of reflections on simple subjects such as a broken leg, family, knitting, and even sheep shearing, all gifted a unique insight by the biggest human heart.

I don’t presume to compare my drawings with Barbara Kingsolver’s poetry, but my use of evaporative marks and transformations of objects (recently, templates) try to express a similar concept: nothing goes away, it just changes, because we are composed of parts of the universe. I am encouraged and inspired by her writing.