HEATHER ELIZA WALKER
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15 May: Forgotten drawing

15/5/2022

 
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No blog last week, because it was my birthday, and a very nice day it was, too, sunshine and barbecued chicken tikka on skewers.
Last week I was rummaging around in my web albums looking for something which was nothing at all to do with this drawing, but it caught my eye and I fished it out and put it in my iPad photos. That was just as well, because now I can find neither the photo in the web album nor the original of this forgotten drawing. It was obviously photographed in a sketch pad, and I think I know which one (2015) but I have hunted through all of them now and it just doesn't seem to exist any more.
Anyway, it caught my eye, probably because I have been doing so much work inspired by the Voynich manuscript in my illustration work recently. There are the large, ink leaves leading down into a taproot which extends along the bottom of the page then, from a balloon shaped bulb on insignificant plant shoot rises upwards nearly to the top. The section at the very bottom of the page interests me most of all, where there is a line of asemic text running above the taproot, and some loopy, curly striped letters made out of smaller roots. It really is a lot of fun, and more where I want to be in my work just now. I am collecting bits and pieces together for when I start some new work once the illustrations for children's book is finished. It's starting to get quite exciting.

01 May: A Voynich manuscript revisit

1/5/2022

 
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Over time I have made a few works inspired by the Voynich manuscript, but I have never before got in really close and traced an image. Working on my iPad made it a delightful and natural process. It was fascinating to trace the movements of an unknown hand from the past, a kind of collaboration with an unkown person (or persons) spanning the centuries. I was surprised to see how my tracing above actually looked rational and somehow complete, making a kind of sense (at least to me) that the wildness of the original doesn't. That may or not be a good thing.
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I do ask myself the question, would it be so interesting if the manuscript wasn't such an unfathomable mystery? I love Culpeper's Herbal, too, but not to such a degree that I want to draw it. I can't remember when exactly I started using asemic text in my work, but I think that may also have originated in my interest in the Voynich manuscript.
Pictured below are some watercolours based on the manuscript I made in 2012. The photographs look fuzzy because the paintings are on semi-opaque Japanese tissue, so they cast a shadow on the mounting board below. They are animated and spirited, and impossible to photograph clearly. I was interested in weird roots back then.
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25 October: Why I draw music

25/10/2021

 
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My partner is a modular musician, so there is music or sound (not always musical!) all around the house every day. The notion that music doesn't exist until it is played absolutely fascinates me and to see this big rack of buttons, sliders, and dials with its spaghetti tangle of cables and blinking lights suddenly burst into life at the flick of a switch is a wonder. Where was all that sound until that moment? Does it lurk unseen in the cables, and where does it go when it's all turned off - back into the electric point? The fact is, it's in the musician's brain. I think I just wanted to pinpoint something physical in these drawings because my brain gets as tangled as those cables thinking about it.
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18 October: How I draw music

18/10/2021

 
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Phew, what a week that was - Captain James T. Kirk actually went into space, aged 90, and satellite Lucy is off to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids for 100,000 years to discover the origins of everything. It's quite overwhelming.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, I just keep drawing: I start each drawing with a statement at top left, like the chord played in folk music before the jig starts up and the devil's music gets everyone delighted and dancing. It's followed by a succession of whirly characters, then towards the end at bottom right I make a couple of extended shapes to indicate a slowing down, before a big triumphant flourish at the end. It's a sort of duuuummmm-de-Boom! sound, but in pen. While I'm drawing I'm thinking shapes evocative of musical instruments: cellos, violins, tubas, flutes. Radiating shapes represent swelling melodies amongst firework bursts of sound. There is a pulse or rhythm indicated by the punctuation of black shapes, which originated in my asemic text drawings (is there such a thing as asemic music?) Paradoxically, this is a quiet, slow practice which helps to sooth away all the terrors of space, in every sense.

This is the third drawing for submission to Open Eye Gallery's upcoming On a Small Scale exhibition.

11 October: Robin's parade

11/10/2021

 
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The second submission to Open Eye Gallery annual Christmas show. Last week's drawing brought up a much better suggestion for its title, still in Polish theme, from an old university friend on Instagram: 'Mazurka'. I like it! ..."usually at a lively tempo, with character defined mostly by the prominent "strong unsystematically placed on the second or third beat" (Wikipedia). My friend nailed it, so the first drawing shall indeed be titled Mazurka and not Polka as I originally thought.

I was thinking of a title for this one, but I've found it now. It has a sombre rhythm and references to tubas and brass, and unintentionally some of the black shapes resemble funeral urns - so I'm thinking more in terms of a New Orleans funeral parade: those great, joyful celebrations of a brilliant life lived. For my younger brother, Robin, who tragically passed away in June. He was a musician, luthier, roadie, and a keen lover of black soul music; and a passionate believer in Scottish independence. He was at the frontline of many marches, carrying the saltire flag. He even designed a new saltire for Scottish independence which is in use today. Somehow I think he chose the title for this drawing himself, the mischievous spirit! He jinxed earlier attempts of mine to title the piece, I typed it wrongly at least five times. Robins Parade it is, then. I'm leaving the title ambiguous by omitting the apostrophe on Robin, so it could equally be the song-bird's music at dawn. Both interpretations are meaningful.

20 September: Music and movement

20/9/2021

 
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A 1969 teachers' handbook which belonged to my mother, found alongside a blank manuscript pad.
Open Eye Gallery's annual 'On a Small Scale' exhibition is on the horizon, so it's time to get on my A5 mojo.
Some time ago I found an old pad of blank manuscript paper in the house amongst a heap of music books. I found the pale blue-grey, thin, mechanical lines of the staffs on creamy paper exciting, full of the possibilities of unheard melodies played on strange instruments. I decided to keep it for drawing.
I began a test piece over the weekend, thinking I could perhaps make something for the exhibition, but things didn't go quite as I had imagined.
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Not going as planned ...
I began by sprinkling small watercolour dots over the surface in a manifestation of unfettered notation, a sort of musical asemic text. All was good at this point, but when I began drawing it didn't go so well. The paper is smooth with little bite, it absorbs more ink than the Japanese paper I normally use, and there isn't enough control of the pen pressure so my marks look rather clumsy. I began to overthink the reference to music and nothing looked like the picture I had in my head.
I prefer the watercolour dots on their own. They dried in tiny crisp dots with fine, darker halos, but the pen-work is out of harmony in every sense.
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There is a drawing in here somewhere
 A fine technical pencil may work better, so here's the plan:

1. Try again on the found manuscript paper using technical pencil
2. Prepare for drawings with hand-drawn monotype staffs on Japanese paper

It means mechanical staffs v. hand-drawn; both have equal appeal. I have a feeling the monotype/drawing option may be best for the exhibition, as the pencil option may look like a blank sheet from a distance - but is that a problem? I have never shied away from work which doesn't shout, but whispers.

26 October: On a Small Scale

26/10/2020

 
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My 'honorary brother', Ian, has been in Venice for a few days. We grew up together in the same street in Scotland and did our spell in London at the same time, but now he lives in Germany so I don't see so much of him (especially these days when nobody sees much of anybody!) but we speak twice a week on the phone. Every day when he was in Venice he sent me photos of his hotel and places he had been, which I am sure unconsciously rubbed off on me because as I was deciding on a title for this one I realised there were references to canals, Renaissance buildings and motifs, the romantically scruffy and slightly broken feel of Venice, misty vague shapes, and I noticed the unreadable writing in a foreign language (asemic text) had a distinctly dangly appearance. Ian had sent me a photo of the most beautiful old Murano glass chandelier (in his bedroom!!!) which made a huge impression on me - I love it so much, I reckon without knowing it the chandelier influenced the delicacy and suspended nature of the lettering.

So, this one is titled Letter From Venice. It will be going off to the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh for inclusion in the annual Christmas Exhibition On a Small Scale along with two other works of A5 dimensions. The exhibition is going to be online for the first time in its history. It was a good move on the Gallery's part  because who knows which Covid alert tier Edinburgh, or any of our cities and towns, will be in next month. If the spread of the virus doesn't slow down it could happen that non-essential businesses will be forced to close their doors again. If that does happen, the show goes on - three cheers for the internet! 

27 September: A visitor from Mars

27/9/2020

 
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New drawing in progress with a comet, of course, and more unreadable writing. The section at the bottom right (pictured above) looked to me like a strange machine, so I gave it cloud puffs rising up towards the comet. I drew the comet around a splodge of dark red monotype ink which I thought gave it a sultry  Martian look.

21 September: About asemic writing

21/9/2020

 
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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.
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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

 
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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.
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15 June: The spaces between letters

15/6/2020

 
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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.
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25 MAY

25/5/2020

 
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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

 
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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

 
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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

 
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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!
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    Welcome to my work journal. I usually post here once a week on Sunday, but there are often 'bonus' posts in between of interesting things like growing carrot tops and avocado pits, the odd piece of work I do as Binky, and news items.
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    As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
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    Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent.
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