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Grids, ... well, loosely
For some time now the idea of working with grids has been floating around in my mind. One could say that as I work with the quilt form, that would in some senses be inevitable, I suppose. I very much respond to the juxtaposition of the formal with the informal - such as seeing a lush planting of a loose, 'unruly' plant spilling out of a neat border of box hedging.
Dry stone walls appeal to me in the same sort of way. I like the way that they fall down too.
This one was outside the boathouse where we were staying on Skye, and had once gone right down to the loch at the left, but was now falling down gradually. On our way cross country as we came homewards we saw some beautiful new drystone walls which had neat sticking out lines - two: one towards the top, and one towards the bottom. (Please forgive the lack of technical terms. I am totally ignorant about the subject, and have not yet been able to track down anything similar on the Internet. I did find this website, however, which is full of interesting information.)
As luck turned out there is an exhibition of Sean Scully paintings on at mima which I wanted to cross the country to see. (At this point we were at a narrow part of England, and could cross with no great trouble, and still be -sort of- on the way home. And on our way across we saw the walls mentioned above.)
Although Sean Scully is also interested in dry stone walls, his work, and these paintings on display are of a tightly disciplined griddy nature. These are not anything I would strive to achieve, but I love them, and what really makes them beautiful for me is the use of colour.
I found it to be an excellent exhibition, which not only attracted me, but reinforced my thinking about the countryside I had been looking at for the past week or so. Scully has said that “People tend to think of abstraction and abstract. But nothing is abstract: it’s a self-portrait. A portrait of one’s condition” in describing his work. This has loosened up my thinking about how to relax about using elements of what I see and what I feel without having to reproduce the source of those elements. This is probably obvious, but I have found it difficult to realise within my creative practice.
Printmaking has been very helpful to me, even in my clumsy elementary forays into the craft. Another great input during this holiday has been my finding a great book (yes, I bought yet another book!): Wildlife in printmaking. The quality of the printmakers is wondrous, the reproductions look superb, and the printmakers very generously describe their techniques.
So this holiday has been a supremely stimulating time, and I am happy to say that my first day back in the print studio today was a gloriously productive one. I am taking further the loose gridmaking approach which I used with the monotypes I made in the final session of last term - using a roller laying of of ink, vertically and horizontally on a polyester litho plate which has a figurative, and non-grid image.
I can't show you how the prints look as they are now drying on the rack. My purpose is not to keep them as prints, but to use them as elements in the design of a large piece of textile work.
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2 comments:
"Gloriously productive" -- what a fine phrase to describe a fine phase (sorry, I couldn't resist the turn of the phrase; count it as a passing phase).
I was thinking as I saw the blog previous to this one that I am not "inspired" by the gorgeous natural (or human-made) things I see -- I love looking and love having seen, but for my "inspirations" for art I can't make use of them.
Which is strange because I paint representational scenes. But they come more from made-up stories and made-up histories and questions about why this and that than from intrinsic "look".
And then in this blog, you say "But nothing is abstract [or representational in my own thinking]: it’s a self-portrait. A portrait of one’s condition.”... This has loosened up my thinking about how to relax about using elements of what I see and what I feel without having to reproduce the source of those elements. "
I am worse off than you in some regards, in that relaxation is a much looser state than I exist in when I look at, say, a stone wall. I know it's much more beautiful than anything I could produce so why even try -- such a lack of "inspiration" might bring me close to despair, if I didn't have some connection to that stone wall I'm staring at, something that triggers an upwelling of story/history/personal emotion.
My paternal grandfather laid stone walls for a living for a while, and my mother lived in the mountains on a farm where the fields, now being lost in the forest, were ringed with hand-laid stone walls. You come across these walls in the middle of mid-growth forest where nothing else seems to exist and it's like magic. Likewise, small-gauge railways ran through the same woods, which they used to haul out logs when they stripped the forests in 1900. They are like footpaths leading nowhere, but clearly human-designed. The metal is gone for the most part, but the path remains. And my grandparents boarded and fed loggers on the farm, the remains of buildings and housing still standing as stone foundations and such.
Once a two-person cross-cut saw was left in a tree -- forgotten, or bcame so stuck the workers gave up -- and my father took me to that old tree -- much older than 100 years by now, just to show me the saw, sticking out on two sides.
All this narrative behind which lies other acres of emotions and personal and US history and environmentalism -- in a stone wall. So I could paint the stone wall but only as a narrative of myself.
In brief, once again you have contained an enormous insight into a short comment:-)
And it's so delightful that your trip gave you so much new energy as well as new insights.
June, thanks for your comment - thought provoking as ever. Inspiration is a broad term when I think of it in relation to myself and my work. What I take a second look at is not something which I can see a direct use for in my work either in particular or in general. But my eye and therefore my mind is drawn, and the input is added to the piles of junk already in there. For a long time I thought that I should be able to draw directly on these inputs, but over time I have learned to accept that it is the soup and how it tastes to me rather than the individual ingredients which provides the output.
I recognise your 'why bother competing' reaction to beauty in whatever form. I do not want to reproduce, except perhaps in very specific instances when I see a piece of art which I wish that I could have made. But gradually I am becoming self-confident enough that I do not even feel that any more. I know that I had skill at doing what I did for a salary, and now in slowly defining a plot of creative landscape for myself, I am learning to tend that plot to my satisfaction.
It is difficult leaving behind the need for approval and acceptance, and to measure progress for oneself, by judicious discrimination in a constantly self-improving critique. It is so difficult to stand back from oneself. It is also so hard to learn what one thinks of anything, and why, - except that age and custom does have an advantage here!
I am interested to read of your connection with stone walls. I like the pictures you have conjured in my mind with your telling of the forest growing over man's previous intervention, and of the rail tracks, and the evocative image of the saw stuck in the tree.
I think that anything we present as a piece of visual art comes from everything we contain in that attic of our minds, and any connections made with each viewer relies on the contents of their own attic. You have a personal history with dry stone walls, whereas I think of a more abstract artisanal skill, the dividing of land, the way sheep rub themselves against the stones, the way the stones form a griddy non-grid, the colours of the stones, the lichen, etc., etc. But you have that as well as your personal history, so that if you painted a dry stone wall, in order to appreciate your extra connection , one would have to read the background notes.
Thinking about my reaction to your story about your grandparents reminds me that I did wonder at some point in my life how the visual aspects of art came to be so important relative to storytelling, and literature. I guess it is that a picture is more directional, and what with the development of lifestyle advertising the imagination is in danger of becoming an appendix.
Yes, the trip was great in beginning to set me back to rediscovering the person I was when I first left home. Somewhere lost in that attic of junk is an independent mind!
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