MAY 11: Frame frottage works

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.