To stand and stare

Sara Brennan: Broken white line with green

Joanne Soroka: Fragment No.7

William Jeffries: Knapping

... well, to look around and take stock at least. Although I believe that it is very important to take time to stand and just stare, I think that it is more important to take time to put oneself in a different viewpoint. As I get older time seems to whizz past increasingly faster, and so I will have to institute some kind of deliberate shift of viewpoint. Before my mother had her stroke I had started to look at residential weekend courses, and even went on a batik on paper course.

Now not only are residential courses out, but I also want something more sustained, making me think deeper, wider: challenging me more. After thought I have chosen printing, but on the way I considered other craft/technique based creative activities. One such was tapestry weaving. Indeed, an introduction to same was to be my next weekend course.

The conjunction of art and textiles began for me with tapestries. My personal experience with textiles was the stitching I did with female relatives in Greece. This was almost exclusively cross stitch and for the practical purpose of making items for my bottom drawer! I became most aware of tapestry weaving during the 1960s in Edinburgh when the great Archie Brennan was director of Dovecote Studios there.

It was a period of awakening for me when I first encountered the work of poets and other writers, artists and thinkers while I was still at school, and then at University. Edinburgh was for me my then Internet! It was seeing the artwork of contemporary creators and others rendered in fibre which excited my thinking about how it was possible to make work which was not necessarily painted on canvas.

Having seen and been excited by Archie Brennan's own work, and followed the development of studio tapestry weaving through my subscription to Crafts magazine in the 1970s, I have maintained my interest. From time to time I have been lucky enough to encounter the actual work of weavers such as Jilly Edwards, Annika Ekdahl, Aino Kajaniemi, Sue Lawty, Sara Brennan, and Meabh Warburton whom I encountered several years back at a Chelsea Crafts Fair in London.

I also read Meabh's blog, where a wee while ago she mentioned an upcoming exhibition involving three of my favourites: France, studio tapestry weavers, and folks who have lived, worked and or studied in Edinburgh. I shall have to wish myself there whilst it is on from 16 July till 18 August. The disappointment of not being able to be there is mitigated in the tiniest way by saving me the irritation of not being able to view the work in the morning before the heat settles.

Meabh emailed me the three illustrations at the top, and they look beautiful. I wish them a great show. Sigh.

On the tiles: progress

My exercise to use up bits of silk screen printed design based on cathedral tiles is going well. I am happy with the way that the printed silk bodies have taken the ink, and how well they stitch. The cutting away was a bit fiddly - but when is it not.

I wanted the biggest piece to be more active, and so decided to adapt and use a juggler figure I'd used previously. I wanted to echo the colours in the background, and so thought about masses of Greek postage stamps I have. One series (at least) used reproductions of black and red figured vases from antiquity, and so I have made them into collaged circles: juggling balls.

Almost there, but not quite. One aspect of this exercise which should have entered into my thinking at an earlier stage is just how am I going to present the pieces. The first two are pinned up on my wall so that I can ponder the question. The third and biggest piece poses a different problem in that it is on much flimsier fabric, and I might have to bondaweb that to a sturdier layer.

But apart from that, I'm pleased with the outcome. I know that I have not moved forward as far as design is concerned - I have used figures again from my stock. But that does not matter in this case. I have come out of that immediate comfort zone of either having designs printed large to make into quilts, or printing them onto transfer paper to stitch on cotton. Yes, I have still used printing (the original silk screen as background and the A4 silk sheets I put through my own printer), but in enough of a different way that it stirred the little grey cells.

Having to think again about presentation is also a plus in the exercise, although it might appear to be a stumbling block. It's all about getting myself solving problems again, and out of solving problems comes even more creativity, I have found.

Thought-provoking input

Bridget Riley: Red with red

We went to the National Gallery today to catch the Bridget Riley display before it is taken down. What wondrous stuff! There are but a few paintings, but what a feast for brain and eye. Colour and light are her drivers, and it is fascinating to pursue her analyses of the use of colour in Raphael, Mantegna, Seurat and others alongside her own works. My brain is still chewing, and it will be some time before even a small part is fully digested. Conceptual art is supposed to be the intellectual genre, but it is Riley who gets my mental juices flowing.

Pursuing process

Many many years ago I played around with lino cutting and produced the above image. Later, by scanning it into the computer, digitally collaging it with other stuff, and having a couple of versions printed, I turned it into a couple of quilts.

During the intervening years I have been meaning to do some more lino cutting, printing, and developing, ... but never got round to doing more than buying the lino and having passing thoughts and furtles around Google. When my living situation changed and I kind of 'closed down' creative operations somewhat, I packed away all the gear.

However, the back of my mind was stimulated by my discovery that Julie Speed spent a chunk of her year working on collages in order to regenerate and stimulate her main activity of painting. I wrote a post about her here. Doing something else, not totally unrelated in order to fire the ol' cylinders appealed to me. And recently this wheeze jumped to mind when I was looking for some way of sparking my brain and its seizing gears.

When my mother returned from her respite stay, I wanted to pursue an activity which would take me out of the house regularly, so that I would not be sucked into the closedown I experienced before. I wanted a creative activity which I had thought about, but which I had never pursued seriously - so that there would be a deal of research and learning involved to occupy large and different areas of my thinking. I wanted something which was apart from textiles, but which would contribute to my overall design generation. And I wanted an activity which had teachers and facilities which were not impossible to access.

So - printing it is! And the class started with monoprints. Here are snaps of my first efforts: I used two plates each time, and printed the second plate on top of the second print each time. This was so that I could hang onto an image of the 'bottom/background' print for my own reference especially as I was thinking on my feet and had had no plans for this at all. I am a complete novice.

The exercise was to work in two colours only to begin with, and I chose black and white (two of my favourite colours!).

I was really pleased with the way the figure became lost in what I chose to make weather - remember I'm starting with an empty brain when I face the unmarked acrylic plate and the load of black and white inks. I was making the 'designs' up as I went along.

This is my second effort, which I tried to make landscape-like, with a little bit of perhaps oppresive winter involved. The second printing lost a lot of the heavy dark, and so I thought would not look right the way up I had designed (!) it, so turned it round to put figures on.

I regretted the decision as soon as I saw the result - but on reflection, I do like it this way. And I'm loving the printing classes.

Recent reading

Corot: Woman reading a book

Sometimes it seems not the right time to read a book or an author. I don't know why, but there it is. This has increased my shelves full of as yet unread books, and added to the lists of as yet untried authors. Well, this recent trip has given me an opportunity to catch up on both categories: a book from my shelves, and an author long on my wish list.

The second of these is Alice Munro. For years I have read reviews of her short story collections which have encouraged my desire to read them - and yet for some unknown reason I never have. I cannot fathom it because I love the short story form and have many collections to which I return to re-read far more often than to novels. Indeed I very rarely have re-read a novel. Anyway, I happened to mention this while my husband and I were browsing in a bookshop, and lo for my last birthday I received The view from castle rock, and Too much happiness.

I started with the former. Again perhaps odd, because it is a whole, whereas the latter is a collection. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed The view from castle rock, in which Munro has taken facts about her ancestors in the Scottish Borders, and documented history of their emigration to Canada, and has woven a fictional life between the warp of those facts. It is more than a history, more than a biography (although the second half is about Munro as a youngster, and her life with her parents), and more than a fiction.

Perhaps it was not so odd, however, because one project I am looking at to re-stimulate my work process is that of Mapping the future: Where are you now? My thinking around this started with tentative attempts to map my past, and thus the Munro book was pertinently stimulating. And I still have the short story collection to which I can look forward .

One book of short stories I did read was again stimulated by a review - this time of Tessa Hadley's most recent novel The London train. Because we were going to Wales, and Hadley lives there I decided to try out Sunstroke and other stories. I enjoyed the collection, although I did feel that I would have become tired of them had there been many more.

The book which has been on my shelves for some years, and which I now was ready to read is The eye's mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings. It was to my annoyance that I discovered that my edition Collected Writings 1965 - 1999 has now been superseded by a new edition: 1965 - 2009! I am nearing the end of my edition, and I am just going to have to buy the new one.

Reading Magdalena Abakanowicz on her own work and its development was such a stimulus to me that I was desperate to continue that kind of exciting input. Bridget Riley has not disappointed in the slightest. She is so focused and serious about her thinking about what it is she wants to achieve that she provides a fascinating example of single minded creativity. It is marvellous how as an abstract artist she can be so illuminating on examinations of figurative art - such as the work of Titian, Rubens, Poussin, Cezanne, Seurat, Matisse, .... It is the use of colour she is examining, but more than just that: it is the effect of the colour.

I am certainly hoping to get to London to see her current work on show at the National Gallery. When I first read Hilary Spurling's review of the show back last year I was too tied up to take time and space to visit the displays. Now I am glad that I have had this delay which has put my mind in a better position to appreciate it, both because I need it, and because I am better attuned having read Riley's thoughts on her own and others' work.

A gulp of fresh air in Wales

Laucharne castle

Normally public holidays are quiet home times for us - but circumstances
dictated that now was the time to go, if we were to go anywhere. So off to Wales we went for a few days. These are a few of the snaps I took on what was a diverse and sunny break, which turned out to be just what I needed to recharge the run down batteries.

It is an amazing year for dandelions: millions of them everywhere! This is in the dunes at Poppit Sands.

Slate walls are everywhere, and I love the way that the ends are rounded.

Mwnt church

An unexpected 'stain' on the rock!

Where there were no slate walls there is living basketwork round the fields.

Kidwelly castle

Inside the Great Glasshouse in the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

One of the sculptures in the Cardiff Bay development