Design challenges

Recently the brilliant fabric designer Susan Collier died. Collier Campbell designs were joyous accompaniments to my career years in London, and my spirits always rise when I see an example from those days.
The design at the top of this post is a birthday card version by the publisher Roger la Borde of the Collier Campbell design Egyptian Birds.
Reading the obituaries, and looking back at the designs with which I am so familiar both in my own home, the home of my friends, and my memories, I started thinking about repeat patterns. In my current designing over the past several years I have not thought about repeats, but in the early to mid-90s I did make a lot of repeat designs for my knitwear.
Indeed I spend a deal of much enjoyed time designing both geometric and figurative designs to be worked in Shetland wool on my trusty (and sometimes not-so- trusty !) second hand Brother knitting machine.
My even earlier experience as a child working with printed cross stitch designs, and then designing my own suddenly became useful. One never knows when life will require the skills that you don't know you are acquiring!
I decided to take a couple of the figurative designs and use the Egyptian Birds palette as a starting point for who knows what.
First I wanted to create repeats of the pattern in a file - and because of various limitations in the scanner and on the knitting machine template I had to make a little adjustment which can be seen in the yellow gap in the image below. But a few little fiddles apart I achieved the basis from which to develop something.

I did not want the whole pattern, and I also wanted to use the facility to reverse the pattern in layers that the painter program gives me. Also I found that the pattern itself was not enough for me. I wanted a strong focal point. However, that in a way was getting away from the idea of repeat which I wanted to develop. So - how about a focal point figure, repeated -?

I used the jiggery-pokery that I employ with the design of all my images, and I must say I'm relatively pleased with the result. I used the Egyptian Birds palette as a starting point, but strayed to adjacent tones to make the thing my own. I also see that my focal point figures are very influenced by my memories of the drawings and prints of Elisabeth Frink, an exhibition of which I saw a wee while ago.

Indeed I was pleased enough to take another design, and work on it similarly. But I think that that will be it along these lines for a while. I shall perhaps pursue repeats but not in this exact way, in order to create a creative pause. I have been lucky that these turned out OK, but I usually find that pushing my luck tends to end in crumples of frustration.

Instead I moved on to design challenges afresh. My printing classes follow terms, and so I am still on holiday until towards the end of next month. I have not wanted to let the momentum lapse, however, so meantime have been researching and thinking. As a side bar to the thinking on repeats has been an exploration of linocut printing (which could also be used to generate repeat designs in the form of block prints perhaps). I am reading a step-by-step book for background, information, technique, etc. while jumping past the idea of starting with simple designs.

I am not interested in technique for its own sake, but as a means to achieving the end. Of course the means can be rewarding, and challenging on the way - indeed I prefer it that way. But I don't want to engage in the exercise for the exercise itself. So, I wanted to look at the kind of image I would want to make, and see which aspects could be interestingly rendered in linocut.

I have made a few tentative steps. It's not as straightforward as it looks, and I am sure will turn out to be even more complex when I go on to start with blade on lino. But I love the challenge of starting with the kind of image which I want to make, and adapting my design methods and the image itself to a different technique, and watching how this adaptation feeds into my wider design development.

All designs in varying degrees of progress.

Beautiful baskets

Sometimes things just come together in the most pleasing way - and result in pure joy.
I love baskets, and have collected many over the years. In my second career I have found a practical use for some of these baskets for storing threads, scissors, bobbins, tape measures, etc. But most important have been my winnowing baskets from Zimbabwe. Who would have known that they would turn out to be the perfect way of storing and carrying my ongoing stitch projects: deep enough to hold specific threads, scissors, and pins etc. and the work itself whether it fits in snugly, or spills over.
Well, recently I have been working on far more pieces than before, all at different stages, and I needed more baskets. And specifically more of the Zimbabwean ones. Hey ho, I thought, wish away!
Out of nostalgia I googled, and found this and this which show how beautiful these baskets are.
And then I found the Red Giraffe site. Just the baskets I needed and wanted! And at ridiculously affordable prices too, and in the UK!!! And today they arrived.
Retail therapy is an indulgence which these days creates more frustration for me than satisfaction, usually because I cannot find anything other than books which I want to buy. But this purchase was an exquisite bonus. I now have four more beautiful baskets and my immediate needs are more than fulfilled.

Natural wrappings

We went to Kew Gardens yesterday. We had not been for a while, and we wanted to see the exhibition of garden photographs. It is an interesting experience seeing the photographs outdoors rather than in the hushed environs of a gallery. The images have stiff competition from the splendid trees around.

I love Kew, and try to see different areas on each visit. Although there have been many visits over decades, this time we discovered a delightful enclosure formed by a wisteria. And I was delighted to see more examples of wrapping - this time very slow wrapping!

And I was drawn to this example of practical wrapping and tying. This picture is one with which I feel the desire to do something - though as yet no idea what.

All wrapped up

from Sheila Paine's collection

I am following with interest Kathleen Loomis (Art with a needle)'s Package Project posts. Above is an example of a set of packages from Kathleen's blog. And as is so often the case, when you see one example, suddenly there are three.
I first encountered the deliberate wrapping of what might otherwise be called detritus many years ago when I was on an Embroiderers' Guild workshop on using unusual materials. It was taught by Clyde Olliver. Another participant was Gwen Hedley who had brought her beachcombings along. They can be seen beautifully couched, above.
Both Loomis and Hedley seek out their packaged material and are making something out of seemingly 'nothing'. Hedley especially is thoughtfully deliberate, and has been working on this aspect of her work for some years.

I recently encountered another manifestation of such a gathering up: this time by Laura Potter in the exhibition Memoranda at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham. Memoranda is an exhibition of the work of four artists, inspired by objects in the CSC collection.

Laura Potter chose a shoebox full of Lucie Rie's archived small test-glazed pots, and from this she was inspired to create An incomplete archive of unfinished ideas, a small part of which can be seen in the photo above.

She says: For various reasons, these ideas have stopped, or rather I have stopped working on them. They all present me with problems of one sort or another, but because they are still hanging around it is difficult to stop thinking about them. But there are a lot of other things to think about right now, and these ideas are just taking up valuable head-space. I'm going to 'finish' them all, by putting them all in neat little boxes with numbers and labels so they can be archived and forgotten: not for negative, but for positive reasons. (I have edited this slightly.)
It's a lovely idea that the seemingly worthless, discarded, lost, and unsuccessful objects around us can be gathered to create something meaningful beyond a comment on our over-consumption. I like the idea that these repurposings are manifestations of our culture just like the Afghan gun cosy at the top of this post.

The Memoranda exhibition is well worth seeing. It is difficult to sum up in a post to do it justice - and I also found the accompanying book containing essays and interviews with the artists most illuminating.

From the red tablecloth to the green chair

It was just a quick drawing: the table at the cafe up on the mountain should really have been an ideal spot for looking at the landscape. The view was of the city spread out below, and the bay beyond it, but in front of me I saw a possible design: a woman and a plant. I ignored the view, the plates, the food, the glasses and did a quick sketch.

Once scanned into the computer I could start work. First moving the elements around a bit for a more satisfying composition. In my head I thought of this design as working towards The red tablecloth.

I blocked out the areas of colour. Dark to begin, to give a sense of substance before I actually allocate value to the colour. Sometimes I seem just to know what I want to use where; but in this case, maybe because the drawing was quickly snatched so as not to be noticed and quizzed I had not thought much at the time about what I would do.

Also, the figure needed a couple of tweaks: her right hand had been attractive there when I saw it first, but now it flapped somewhat. A string of beads which would echo the red of the small flowers was needed. And hair can be a pain in the colour balance! So headgear is a great solution.

She needed a support for her elbow. There had been chairs nearby, so I drew one in. Chairs are very much part of my memories of cafes, and so thoughts of the tablecloth were fading as this new prop arrived.

I very much liked the green. It was the green of the leaves in reality. But it was too much on the figure. I decided to keep it key, but low key, and that's when the chair came into its own. The piece was now The green chair.

All the backgrounds used to 'colour in' the areas are from my files: the blue, the flower pot, flowers, and beads, and the greens are all from scans of soft pastel work I have done in the past. The clothing is from a photograph I took years ago of an old textile, and the table is from a photograph I took of an ancient fresco.

The size is just under A4, and the design was derived very quickly in order to have something appropriately small to stitch while visiting my mother in hospital a couple of months ago.

Augustaflora

Perfect - at that moment

I prefer to stay away from London in August, because of the crowds at exhibitions, and so it was on the very last day of July that we went up to see this year's Serpentine Pavilion. Last year's was distinctly RED, but this one is well and truly black. Designed by Peter Zumthor, this pavilion is enigmatic on first view.

It was a warm sunny day, the first that really felt like summer, and at first glance the pavilion did not look inviting. I loved the surface, however: a fine scrim all over, and with the entrancing shadows of trees fluttering in a pleasant breeze.

Very early on a Sunday morning, London reminds me of how it was when I first started work here nearly 40 years ago. At lunchtime I sometimes came over to Hyde Park for a stroll: an oasis that feels miles away from all the frenetic bustle. And on entering the pavilion I was filled with delight.

An intriguing dark corridor all round the structure leads to its interior: that place of cool and calm that I craved. One of my favourite aspects of hot bright days is the effect enjoyed in a cool dark room with just enough slats in shutters to let in slivers of that heat outdoors, or a well shaded verandah just like the open atrium design of this space.

Inside this calm sliver of shade and light is planted a bed of cooling plants designed by Piet Oudolf. No matter that many are bright red, the effect is of cool. The open area above them is large enough to invite breeze and bees, and with only two other visitors besides us two, it was bliss.

As ever with the Serpentine Pavilion the cafe tables and chairs are designed to fit. There is a dark blue wooden bench all around the four walls, and tables and stools which look a treat when unoccupied. We were fortunate to see it like this.

As it filled up the space quickly felt more crowded and noisy. The calm disappeared as snaps were taken of folks standing in front of the plants, and groups each in their own bubble intrude into the peace of others. We left before this happened to us.

In this way, I would say that the design is a delight if experienced with few others, unlike the design by Frank Gehry a couple of years ago which embraced occupants, making of us all a theatre for each other. But for me, this year's Pavilion was perfect while we were there.