Category: Asemic Text

21 September: About asemic writing

21/9/2020

The finished drawing. I talked a bit on Instagram this week about the asemic writings I often use in my work. It began by colouring in all the o’s in my school jotters with a pen, followed by all the other closed letter forms, mostly in Latin class. That was quite a few years ago now (nearly 50!) - I just never stopped doing it. At the same time I discovered I could draw on my eraser with biro and print with it - my jotters must have been quite an un-scholastic mess, but I found it all fascinating. I even picked up a couple of words in Latin at the same time.

After discovering the medieval pottery of Samarkand and Nishapur while at Edinburgh University, my filling-in and elaboration of letters became properly fancy. I loved, and still love, finding new forms in text. Although this detail started off as actual hand-written words, I now have absolutely no idea what it originally said. I am intrigued that it still retains the sense of text in spite of being unreadable and devoid of meaning. I think of it as seeing sign-posts in the language and script of a foreign country. You know what they are, yet you are unable to decipher them; they simply remain exotic and mysterious in their existence.

PS We finally sold that house and warmly welcome the lovely young family who moved in on Friday! It has been a busy weekend.

29 June: Fancy grille

29/6/2020

The other day I was playing around with a grille composed of Old West lettering again, I placed it over one of my drawings to see how it would look. It does have a feeling of looking outside from within. I was most interested in the shapes created between the letters, coloured around in black to isolate them.

15 June: The spaces between letters

15/6/2020

This week I have had a push to get the children's book I am illustrating as Binky McKee well on its way to completion. Part of it was to create alphabets of lettering to make a couple of posters for the story in a Wild West kind of font. I became very interested in the spaces between the letters as I was making them into words. In my spare time I quickly threw together this idea in relation to my interest in asemic text and legibility. It made a fascinating screen reminiscent of mashrabiya design. I placed it over a photo I took of the side of a rusty, bashed up skip (when we were moving house two years ago) and some fascinating shapes revealed themselves. They almost look hewn from stone.

25 MAY

25/5/2020

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.

16 NOVEMBER

16/11/2019

After a very busy couple of weeks I got back to work making larger confused flags for the Open Eye Gallery On a Small Scale exhibition. This is an annual event hosted in the run-up to Christmas, when one of their beautiful Edinburgh New Town Georgian galleries is turned over entirely to line the walls in banks of A5-size art by gallery artists. The works are presented simply unframed on the walls in a grid formation, an exciting melting-pot of ideas, materials and colour (the artists' party is great, too). Affordable small works mean a great chance to buy art for Christmas!
It has been interesting to scale up from the miniatures I have been making for Brexit Art Machine, I can fit in more drawing to combine with ideas of obfuscation, disorder, transparency and confusion. I am enjoying the flag invention more than ever as I make flags 14, 15, 16 and 17 in the series especially for the gallery, and then watch out in 2020 for some more miniature flags for the vending machines.

7 great things about this week:
1. Waves aren’t made of water: I watched David Malone’s The Secret Life of Waves on BBC iPlayer. Poetry, philosophy, life and death, needles blowing bubbles, and Professor Michael McIntyre’s fab lab’s wave box at Cambridge University complete with rubber ducks - marvellous.
2. Brexit Art Machine is in London, with my mini confused flags loaded alongside works by brilliant artists in the vending machine! It is popping up at selected venues, and was outside the Houses of Parliament a couple of days ago.
3. A friend making an extremely speedy recovery from a knee replacement and looking fabulous and happy after years of pain.
4. I found a beautiful, tiny insect exhausted on the kitchen worktop. I smeared a strawberry beside it and observed through a magnifying glass: insect found its way to the spot of juice and fed by dipping its proboscis. I noticed it had a pair of curly antlers fringed spectacularly with hairs. After a while it had enough energy to fly away and I felt nurturing and deep-down happy.
5. Coloured pencils so soft it's like drawing with eyeshadow.
6. Relief. When pain, worry, nightmares and things that go bump in the night disappear and you feel yourself again. Maybe it was the full moon.
7. Getting back to work in my room.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

30 OCTOBER

30/10/2019

I had a great trip by train to Edinburgh to deliver 6 more Confused Flags for Brexit Art Machine (or any of the Artobotic vending machines, of course). Delighted that my made-up alphabets have found a place where they make sense by not making sense!

7 great things about this week:
1. Off-peak travel on warm modern trains of comfort and phone chargers.
2. Autumn leaves, irresistibly crisp and crunchy, and the COLOURS!
3. Views from the Forth Rail Bridge: splendificent (spell-check doesn’t like that word! haha, I won)
4. B’s red car on a grey road dotted with bronze leaves.
5. A trip to the Scottish borders and a wonderful weekend with friends. Discovered they are into art, so the newest Confused Flag will be winging its way to them: a thank-you gift for their kindness in making us and our weird greyhound so welcome.
6. Making duvet igloos in bed to maximise snuggling on frosty nights.
7. The sounds birds make at this time of year.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

17 MARCH

17/3/2019

New work in progress: my work room has begun to settle into some kind of order after the house move. I am allowing the drawings a bit more space on the paper than previously, and incorporating messed up things like the little blue rain cloud above, which I drew using carbon paper. I like the fact I can't see what I have drawn until I remove the carbon paper. Surprises keep the work fresh, and there is quite a personality developing in this one.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

28 JANUARY

28/1/2019

Four revisited altered text drawings I made in 2014 when I was making a lot of work using text which I obliterated and altered to suit. This collage shows 4 details. Reading the image from top left in a clockwise direction, here is what was going through my mind at the time.