school trip #2

I'm really enjoying my new job. (Shame it ends in two weeks, hope they ask me back after summer!! fingers crossed!!) It's so rewarding to be able to help the students with their drawings, and their understanding of art. Today we went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to see the Goldsworthy exhibition (and it didn't rain, hurray!).


Although there were a few complaints of 'I'm not walking on poo' (the country park is the home of many sheep and a few geese...) and 'this drawing board is too heavy, will you carry it for me' (my answer: no, carry it yourself. Am I mean?!) it was a successful trip.


We began by doing some sketches of Barbara Hepworth's 'Family of Man', bronze sculptures placed on the hill side amongst the trees. A good opportunity to think about form and shape and size, and how these effect our perception of an object.


It's also good to be able to walk amongst the sculptures and touch them, something we are so often forbidden to do in a gallery. And the colours of the copper and bronze are beautiful.


Some great sketches were done (especially when I could convince them to draw the backgrounds or use a bit of colour or tone) I think the drawing lessons of the last few weeks are starting to pay off, you can see them actually looking, which is brilliant! It makes a real difference.


So after visiting the Goldsworthy stuff (a treat for me and the students seemed to like it too!) with aching feet it was back on the bus, then home for a nice cup of tea. Happy days.

caught thinking...

My friend just sent me this picture of me, taken in the Lady Lever Gallery, in Port Sunlight, Liverpool. It's an interesting place, full of Chinese porcelain and English Wedgewood, jade dragons, Egyptian pots, various furniture, tapestries, paintings in huge gilt frames and slightly saucy sculptures of Victorian ladies. All mixed in together in the gallery, the collection of a rich Edwardian who made his money in soap.


We went to see my tutor's exhibition; bronze casts of everyday things; carrots, rubber gloves and spoons, placed amongst the other objects in the gallery, in the glass cases and behind red rope barriers, to perhaps draw our attention to what we value and how we show it.

Many visitors didn't like it, their comments in the guest book saying 'how can you call carrots art?' but perhaps that's the point... anyway... I had a lovely thoughtful day.

Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

If you are anywhere near the Yorkshire Sculpture Park before January 2008 I would say it's worth making a trip... I visited the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition there this weekend and it really took my breath away.


I love Goldsworthy's work, although I have only seen it in books before now. I find his work unpretentious, thought provoking, beautiful, real. It's not often I go into an art gallery and and feel I don't want to leave, but the things Goldsworthy does with twigs and thorns, logs, stone and clay (to name just a few) just draw me in. There are pictures of the sculptures here, take a look, but I don't think they can quite convey the feeling of being in the room with those objects. The egg shaped Stacked Oak sculpture filled almost the entire entrance lobby, and squeezing round it to enter the gallery was an almost humbling experience, it's such an impressive structure, made entirely from logs wedged together, so strong and imposing. And in the next room a curtain made entirely from leaf stems and thorns, so delicate and fragile.


In fact I find it hard to pin down what it is I love so much about Andy Goldsworthy's work, I find my self amazed by each new piece I see, and thinking 'that's spot on that is'. I like the fact he works with natural things, things everyone has access to and can relate to. And then he does these amazing things with them, that seem so simple but in fact take and draw attention to the detail in nature, the repetition and pattern, the force of the weather and the passage of time. All the things that we might miss as we potter along in life. And he does this on such a grand scale, his output of work is prolific, so many ideas. I think it takes someone very clever to make something so simple and say so much. Spot on.


I think he sums it up best himself in this time lapse video of the construction and installation of the exhibition, worth a watch!

work in progress

hmm...

the wonders of string

One day last week I noticed that the old underpass near my bus stop had been cleared of all the rubbish and junk that normall half fills it. And what should appear there today!






Beautiful!

ta da!

Well I hope I didn't get anybodys hopes up yesterday about this stuff! It's my second go at this gocco thing (first try was a disaster, apart from not being able to see anything but spots from accidentally looking at the flash bulbs, nothing actually came out on the print except for a few dots, not what I intended!)

So here goes...


There are 24 bookmarks for an exhibition as part of the 'Library' project at Leeds Metropolitan University and Situation Leeds. They will be distributed through the librarys of Leeds (there's quite a few!) I like the idea of this project, that bookmarks will be left in books and who knows who may find them or what pages they will end up between...


I love finding random things in books. Whether it's a ticket in a second hand book or something I've put there myself a long time ago, I love that glimps of another life, a different time, something insignifcant at the time...

And I like pressing flowers in books so that's what I printed on my bookmarks!



...And then I felt so sad at having to throw the gocco screen away that I printed on all the random bits of paper and card I could find in my house (and then put the screen in a plastic bag in the fridge, I will use it again, honest! Why can't I throw anything away?)

trees and thoughts

Hmmmm.... what shall I write about today? The sun is shining outside, the birds are singing (it's spring! it's spring!) and I've got the day off work, hurray! It's amazing the difference an extra day off can make to my state of mind... all I need to do is capture this feelng and extend it to everyday life, now there's the challenge!



I've been trying to make these trees pop up today. Not too sucessful yet, the paper is too flimsy, think I need to go back to basics, again... but i'm enjoying the random letters that appear on the trees, the shapes of the text, the overlapping of curves. In the past I've only really worked with plain white paper, focusing on the book structure, the way the pages overlap and how the shadows fall. I didn't want to complicte that. But (another but!) it's actually quite nice to see the text on the page, it almost turns into a pattern until single words jump out. Like spider.



I like the shadows they cast too... I was putting my face down low and pretending to be in a curly tree forrest. Next plan is to make a bigger one, and add in some birds... I've been thinking about birds a lot.



I've also been thinking about this bloging business. There's so much good stuff out there, so many people writing about interesting, thought provoking things and showing the beautiful things they've made. So much inspiration I sometimes feel my head will explode! So much to see I sometimes feel I will get lost and never find my way back, or worse, miss something... Although I don't like to admit it i'm a bit (a bit!) of a control freak. When I make my work I write down every possible option and get frustrated when I can't make them all. I find making choices between things hard. So imagine my trouble when evey blog has a list of links to other amazing blogs, and each one of them with a list... and every day more! How do you keep up?!



But really, I do love this thing that's going on all around me. I find it intriguing, being invited to peek through the windows of other peoples lives, into other worlds (or infact the same world, which is what makes it so nice). Perhaps it's because I'm nosey, but I think it's more than that. It's an exchange of information, a community I never knew existed. I'm really glad I've discovered it all. Very inspiring...

cake as reward

Well I didn't know if I would make it to today (being as melodramatic as I am about these things). At the beginning of the week Friday seemed like such a distant prospect.

But actually this week has been ok. Very busy day today sorting out the hundred and some dissertations handed in. It takes me back to the day I handed mine in, the difficulty of letting go after all that prolonged hard work. But it was worth it! For nostalgia reasons, here are some photos of my essay...


Seen as it's Friday I decided to reward myself with a giant slab (and slab is the right word!) of cake from my favourite cake shop down the road. Mmmmm, dark chocolate icing.


Anyway, as I have no impending deadlines, I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend of reading, drawing, cleaning (yes, cleaning, the relaxing bit is sitting down in a nice tidy house afterwards...) and perhaps a small amount of playing with my boyfriend's new Transformers...


That Optimus Prime really started something!

fun with dictionarys

I love heavy books. I love the way the pages lay...


I was looking in this big old dictionary at work, there's something so satisfying about the thin paper pages slipping over each other, and the weight of them all together...


The curve of the paper, the spine...


And there's some interesting stuff in dictionarys!

I can't decide between clip frames and black wooden frames. Which will look best in a cafe, which will make people think 'hmm, that's nice, I'll buy that please'.


I suppose it doesn't really matter but I like to think about these things. (Well, not LIKE to think about, I find it quite impossible, so many possibilities, but I think it about all the same.) Perhaps the black frames... hmmm

I had a little fiddle about with a stanley knife on these tonight, they were missing that 'something'. Again, not sure if its what I want, but hey! You've got to try!

try

Well, I feel much better today. First day back at school syndrome perhaps... It's not that work was better today, I still felt like getting in the lift and escaping out into the real world, but I think I just talked myself into acepting it. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it's what I'm doing. Hmmm.

So when I got home from work, instead of collapsing on the sofa and letting myself deflate, I ignored the voice in my head saying 'put on the telly, watch Hollyoakes, eat some crisps/cake/chocolate, have a little sleep' and just sat at the table to DRAW. Now the drawings were wobbly and I'm sure would be better if I'd been chilling in the park in the sun all day (like all the students I can see from my office window... grrr), but I stuck at it. I'm trying to take Amisha's advice and get into a bit of a routine, do a little bit of something every night. Well, here's what I made...


They're for an exhibition in a cafe in Hastings (if they get in!), just a little something. They don't look great in this photo, and they're not mounted or anything yet. They are only tiny, about 5 x 3 inches. I chose the pages by the words on them...



I'd done a few when I realised that although some pages had the relevant words on, they also had other words on too. Did you know forrest was next to foreskin in the dictionary?! Perhaps not ideal!



Am going to get some frames tomorrow then off they go in the post...

back

Back to work. Back to the city, back to noise and dirt and rush. Back to people everywhere.


Back to the bus stop, and traffic, and worring if the pigeons will one day get run over right before my eyes.


Back to not saying hello in the street.


Anyway...

I've started reading a new book. I'm only a bit of the way in but am really enjoying it, some of the language is really beautiful, and really striking. This morning, on the bus, I was reading to distract myself from the fact I was off to work once more, and this phrase struck me...

Aunt Lovey used to tell me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed a writer's voice. "Read" she'd say, "and if you have a writer's voice, one day it will shout out,'I can do that too!'"

This just rings so true to me, not about writing but about drawing and making. I sometimes forget I like to do these things, maybe I don't quite have the time, and after a while loose confidence and I don't know where to start. I Forget. But as soon as I look at what others have done, see pictures in a magazine or book, my voice shouts out "I could do that!" "I must try to do that!" I think maybe this is what I mean when I talk about wanting to miss it. I want that creative urge to jump out at me. It's so funny that feeling, that feeling of compulsion to make, to actually get up of my bum and go and get out my stuff and make something. And it's so frustrating to feel that urge rise, then feel it slip away again as the working week goes by.

It felt so wrong today to be sat at that desk today. So against the grain, perhaps it's because it was sunny outside. I felt so trapped. When I think what I could've been doing instead, this time last week I was walking in fresh air, miles away from anyone. I know I'm being melodramatic. I know everone must feel like this when they come back from a holiday. I mean that's why it's a holiday, because its NOT real life. But I just get the feeling that my life could be a little more like that. I don't want to settle for this feeling only 25 days a year. There must be more to it.

At what point do you settle?

whatever the weather

English weather eh? You can't beat it. How is it possible to have so many types of weather in one day? One minute it's snowing so much I can't see a thing, then 10 minutes later it's bright sunshine, lovely blue sky, and I'm thinking 3 jumpers was one too many. But oh no, here come the hail stones, and the wind, in fact no, it's sunny again. It's certainly confusing the chickens! Perhaps it's global warming...

I'm reading a good book at the mo called 'Watching the English', it's all about English behaviour, and the first chapter is, appropriately enough for today, called 'The Weather'. Kate Fox, the author, thinks that we love talking about the weather so much, not because it actually fascinates us, but as a kind of 'social bonding'. The English have a reputation for being uptight and embarrassed in new social situations and saying 'cold isn't it' or 'nice to see a bit of sun' is (she says) a way of entering into conversation, we know where we stand with the weather. All the other person has to do say is 'yes I know' or 'it's been forecast all week' and you're sorted, you know where you stand with that person. And I was thinking about this, and it seems to be true.

I suppose being English myself I don't really notice how I react in these situations, it just comes naturally, so it's funny to read this book and think 'actually yes I do do that!'

I have been doing some drawings of trees today, see what you think.

hmmm...

I was looking under my bed for some scraps of paper to draw on and I stumbled across these etchings and aquatints of trees that I made in Autumn last year. I knew I'd made them but I thought I only had the plates, not any actual prints. But here they are! It's made me realise how much I miss this type of printing though, process intensive and so much to learn. These prints are just proofs really, and I feel like there's so much further to go with them. Maybe I will take a printing class or something. I think having access to a press makes all the difference, I haven't really discovered a way to print etching plates without one, you just can't get the pressure!

When I finnished my degree I felt so overwhelmed with making art. I felt it had taken over every moment of my life and I had perhaps lost sight of what I wanted to make in the midst of all the assesment and 'advice' I was receiving. I felt like I needed a break from it all, that I was taking it too much for granted. I felt like I didn't know what I actually wanted to make, I needed to miss it again.



Well, now I definitely miss it! Very much so! I feel I'm slowly finding what it is I want to do, without the pressure of it being 'art' or 'craft' or, in fact, anything. It's quite liberating to just do what I like. That may sound silly, (it certainly does to me!) but Art degrees can get so, well... involved. Hmmm. I did these drawings today, they're not finnished yet...



Sorry for the blurry photos... from my phone, and I didn't look at them when I took them, but you get the idea...

Don't know. Now I have no sudio and work full time in a none-too-creative job everything seems to take twice as long to bear resemblance to anything half decent. But that's ok I think.


Am making some spicy sweet potato kebabs for tea (Or poo-on-a-stick as my house mate commented, maybe she's got something there...) and listening to the Gary Stewart Band who happen to be having a rehersal in my living room... You should listen, they're very good!



And finally, in reply to Amisha, the bunny (from previous post) is from 'Nursery Knits' by Debbie Bliss, my Grandma gave me the book (She works in a charity shop and comes to visit with some right treasures, tubs of buttons and knitting needles and books). I think it's still in print, it's full of cute outfits with matching animals and shoes. The rabbit is my favourite though, I'm on my fourth one!


Here is the first one I made for a little baby called Seth. He was made with bright blue pearly wool, lovely!

Right, I'm off.