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.

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.

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.

This is really a Binky piece, but the aesthetic is so close to my drawings and there are no drawings on the go at the moment, so I am blogging it in this journal. There are bound to be crossovers between my illustration and design practice and my drawings because I am, after all, the same person and the disciplines do link and interchange.

There are no new drawings right now because I have my head down finishing that children's book (in fact, this illustration is a sort of by-product of work on the book). It's flying along now, its identity is established, and things are falling into place beautifully.

By the way, I tried switching to Wednesdays for writing my blogs, but consistently forgot to do it - Sunday blogging is so deeply ingrained in my weekly schedule, so Sundays it is once more.

The vernal equinox has happened, the clocks have sprung forward, and we have had sun - this can only mean one thing: I'm back in the studio! Yes, even the north room where I work has warmed sufficiently so as not to go blue in the personal extremities when I spend time in there. One of the beauties of a cold winter climate is the abrupt arrival of spring sunshine and warmth, and the joy of getting back to work with real materials - there is now enough light to see pen on paper! The day I get back into the studio is an annual event - see last March.
So here are the first new drawings since the work I made in December - I'm thinking crystalline growth, volcanos, tectonic plates and schisms here. The image above is a finished drawing; below is a work in progress.

In these new drawings I am leaving areas unfilled with the 'shading' marks, which in this case gives a difference in tone suggestive of crystals and fractures. I would normally fill the entire form with shading, but at the moment I'm interested in a faceted appearance and angular shapes.
Speaking of ice and crystals, I am still pondering a way to bring the ice tracings I drew last month on my iPad forward into the physical realm. It's a question of materials, as I would probably trace printouts of the drawings in some way (truth is stranger than fiction) plus I want to use more colour as I go ahead. Experiments are required.

In the light of the recent discovery of some of my lost student paintings, you may well be wondering how I came to work the way I do today. It's rather different to the huge, thickly painted canvasses I was making in the mid-80s, almost the opposite in fact.

Changes in my work began as soon as the mid 80s, and arose from practicality, time, health, location and finances. After finishing the Picker Fellowship at Kingston, Surrey, in 1986, I did take on a large ACME studio in London's Hackney Wick area for a while, but that was the last time I rented a studio; the need to earn a salary meant entering full-time employment, which in turn meant I was paying rent on a studio I didn't have time to use. I had already discovered I preferred working in the privacy of my own domestic environment; during my MA year at Chelsea nearly all my supporting work was made on paper in my flat, so even during that productive period I was only going into the studio to create large canvasses.

When the European touring exhibition Germinations 4 ended in 1988 my works, including Do's and Don'ts (the large 1985 painting shown above, left) were delivered together with works by the other 3 selected British artists to the Royal College of Art for collection. I simply didn't have the wherewithal to collect mine, and so they were abandoned at the RCA. The same fate met a lot of my other large works at the time. It sounds sad, but it was impossible for me to move 8ft canvasses on their stretchers around London, and in fact my interests had already moved on and new work using different media was already underway. I realised if I wanted to keep my work around it had to be portable.

Last week's pencil drawing on manuscript paper turned out to be a good study. Needless to say I am most happy with the choices and decisions I made, the drawings are now positively singing to me. This is the first completed musical drawing for Open Eye Gallery's On a Small Scale winter exhibition. I think I am going to title it Polka - that's what came into in my head when I was drawing this, and it definitely looks like there is dancing going on, maybe a polka, or an eight-some reel or strip the willow?
It's interesting to see how, from a distance, this does resemble sheet music.

The latest drawing in my new series of work. It was impossible to take an evenly lit photograph today in spite of excellent iPhone, the drawing is more delicate than it looks in the above photo. I tried scanning but I couldn't get the scanner to work in a typical day of technology versus me. After spending the morning investigating drivers and repeated attempts to make a scan, B fixed the scanner just by looking at it, urgh! so annoying. However, the scanned details shown below are much closer to the original.
It's plain to see I would much rather be drawing than photographing and publishing them. On that subject, there has been quite a commotion in the artists' quarter of Instagram recently ...

Work began on Monday drawing into the frottage plant prints I made the previous week. Here we have four details (above) and two drawings in their progress so far. I'm pleased with how the work is going, but thought I may have got more done than I did.

I didn't actually get that much time to spend drawing every day, in fact a couple of days saw no drawing at all because I spent a lot of time in the real garden this week. A dry, warm weather front came in following heavy rainfall during previous weeks. The soil dried out rapidly and watering was required nearly every day. Weeds and grass had grown ferociously during the wet spell, and on Thursday I completely remodelled a flower bed at the front of the house, digging out old plants, grass and weeds and planting some new astrantia, aquilegia, and some I don't know what they are at all, donated by our kind neighbour who just happens to be a demon gardener - I do love a chaotic flower bed full of surprises. It kept me busy working and musing on those weird things which come out of the ground, seed heads blowing around, curly tendrils, bulbs, branching things and the fascination of the sweet pea pods drying into twisty shapes, their seeds showing more prominently through their cases; and when I came back indoors, my pen moved to depict them.

One day the sun shone down through the chestnuts, illuminating their spreading leaves like giants' hands, bringing to mind this most beautiful poem.

When I am Among the Trees 
by Mary Oliver
​
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Carrot top update - it did flower! No longer attached to the plant in its pot, I cut the triffidy bit off because it was draining too much energy from the rest of the plant, but it has flourished just in water. The rest of the plant is looking very pretty, with delicate frondy leaves and doing well now it has more energy.

The process of its growth reminded me of some forgotten work I made years ago. I took prints from some umbels by inking them up with a print roller, then transferred the image onto paper by placing the sheet over the inky plants and rolling the back of the sheet with a large wooden roller. Then I began to draw into the prints - the tentative marks show the very earliest beginnings of mark-making techniques I use today.
I can just about make out the year 2008 beside my signature in the lower right corner. I showed this one in Perthshire Open Studios that year and a friend bought it. I then forgot all about it until 2014 when a I visited the friend's house and spotted it hanging in a frame in the lounge. I have no other record of this work than the above photo I took that day - difficult to capture though the glass in its frame on the wall, but I'm glad I have it. It took me ages to locate and dig it out of my photo album. The friend moved to France and then disappeared (I fear the worst) and I will most likely never see this work again.

It was worth taking the time to find the image, not only am I glad to see it again but I mentioned in my last post that I fancied doing something different with my new work moving on, and this is it. My collection of weird stuff on my work room table keeps growing, and it's got to move on to make space, so I will try making some prints from them to draw on with all my current mark-making. I am excited about the prospect.

Just two weeks on and my avocado stone sprout is going crazy. The first one to sprout is pictured below, but the latest, No.3, is really scaring me - its root is all twisty, and when I move the jar it lashes around like a worm, and it has produced something snaky and hairy in its water. Nature is terrifying, I'm the rabbit caught in the headlights - I don't want to look, but I can't stop looking.

These are my very first successes after many years of trying to get an avocado stone to sprout! (Apologies for hairy finger, looks like everything is sprouting right now)

I just can't believe how this detail from Before There Were Saturdays relates to the current avocado stones sprouts, given I have never had any success with growing them before.
By the way, I am thinking about doing something different with new work moving forward. I still haven't found what it is, but it will happen.

Shortly after drawing last week's sprouting carrot tops, I drew a the core of a bell pepper. Its flesh had been cut away for a salad leaving the arched pyramid form with its bustle of seeds inside, rather like a deconstructed buttressed church sheltering a congregation. Or a big ghastly alien throat, if you prefer. It hung around in my work room and began involving itself in a most interesting process - I wouldn't say it was decomposing, because nothing went mouldy (wrong PH for mould, perhaps, a bit like sourdough culture?) - the fleshy parts just began to disappear leaving the seedball intact, I suppose by dehydration. I drew it again collapsing upon itself, pictured below.

I didn't throw it away after drawing it, I seldom do throw away these things, hence my collection of gross objects which will freak anybody out when I die and they come to empty my room. But look what it has become now. The photos below show what's left; it's the size of a conker now, and the small remaining part of the base of the pepper (right pic) has become a pretty flower. From a big, proud, glossy green fruit my bell pepper has gone to this - fascinating, as Spock would say. It actually feels nice to handle.
Oh well, I suppose it happens to us all in time!  I will get around to drawing its remains soon which will clarify what I see, something photos cannot do. And I may even experiment with growing the seeds.

Last Wednesday I completed the first drawing for 'The Architect's Garden' series. I hit upon the title In No Way Pure by accident; I overheard the words "no way pure" listening to something while I was working on the very last segment of the drawing. I just knew it was the perfect title, with a nod to Le Corbusier and Purist architecture, at the same time as referencing the promiscuous spawning activity of the organisms in the drawing. I hastily scribbled a note at the time, but omitted to note the source.

The phrase may have come from Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (Arena) on BBC iPlayer, but I'll have to watch that again to find out if that is so. I have no problems with watching it again as I have a Delia Derbyshire obsession. It could also possibly have come from Sisters With Transistors produced by Anna Lena Films. B and I purchased a ticket to watch the film on virtual cinema, but I feel that was too long ago (12 May) for the stage the drawing had reached by the time I heard the phrase. That's an amazing film, by the way, documenting the seriously cool women who pioneered electronic digital music. Even if you're not a fan of the musical genre, the trailer alone is worth a watch. I made screeds of notes in the dark while watching it which are pretty much illegible, but no mention of "no way pure" amongst them. If you are reading this off in the future (ooh, time travel - play that Dr Who theme again!) the links will most likely have expired, apologies for that.

Anyhow, I digress; as soon as I finished the drawing I began trying out some papers from the sample pack of Awagami Factory papers I received on 17 April. I have been itching to try them out, but wouldn't allow myself the pleasure until I finished the drawing, I just kept gloating over them until now. I used my main mark-making techniques on both sides of the sheets, pictured below are my two favourites. The labelled sides are the 'reverse' side with the 'right side' beneath; on the left is Kozo Natural Select 46gsm which is a lovely soft natural white, and on the right is Kitakata SH-16 36gsm, which has a most pleasant buff colour.