 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!  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!  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!  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.
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The Weekly
Welcome to my blog. I am an artist in Fife, Scotland, represented by the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh.
I also work in design and illustration. Visit my other website under my nom de plume Binky McKee to see what goes on there.
PIC OF THE WEEK
It's often the details - a tiny section cropped out of a photo of our bedroom window, looking very Dickensian Christmassy.
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