Last Friday, instead of braving the flurry of snow to drive to printmaking, I decided to curl up with my reading. There is something about a good cover of snow which lightens the air, and creates what seem ideal conditions for staying indoors with books. And it meant that I was able to finish reading Vol.3 of the Picasso biography, and get started on a new book.
From time to time I would wonder that it had not yet stopped snowing, and that it was cold enough to stay sculpted where it fell. And of course with the blanket came the silence.
One of the beauties that snow brings is how it draws attention to form and structure in trees, and in bushes. The berberis with its red stems and the nubbles on its branches glowed warm.
The holly leaves are losing their prickles anyway, but the snow added a most benign looking rounding to the whole appearance.
And the poor hypericum showed up its cruel pruning starkly - while also exposing the new whippy growth.
Previously, pre-snow, the sedum on the gravel at the edge of the brick path had looked dowdy and untidy. Now with all else erased, it became an enticing small sculptured landscape on its own.
As well as the reading I managed to finish a small piece of stitching. I'm not wholly confident about this piece - it is for the time being a kind of treading water piece. It's a small self portrait digitally derived from two main elements.
I started with a blind drawing I had done of myself as an exercise some years ago.
I wanted to use this with a couple of collagraph prints - one as background,
and one as the colour for the line drawing.
There were a couple of thoughts behind this: I have been wanting to try using the results of my printmaking in various stitched projects. Also, I've been thinking quite a lot about my forebears recently, and somehow I wanted to have a kind of ghostly presence in a self portrait.
So, having scanned all three above, I used my Painter program to create the file to be sent off for printing onto cotton. (I send a composite file of images to be printed together.)
On the cotton the background is less well defined: even more ghostly - but somehow the stitching within the head area brings the background out again. Below is a hasty snap I took after ironing the completed piece. I'm still not sure what I shall do with it - but I'm glad that it's done.
Self portrait with forebears 395 x 385mm
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2 comments:
You are so right about the special beauty and quiet of snow. As long as you don't have to travel in it, it is so very meditative to watch it fall and sculpt the landscape. We haven't had much here this winter, but it's not over yet, is it?
As always I enjoy following your experiments and thought processes. The self-portrait seems a fascinating new element, and I like your stitching of it. Look forward to following more of this piece's development. Good luck!
We are only half-way through what is officially winter - so who knows what could happen to the weather.
Thank you for your comments on the self portrait piece. I'm not sure of anything I'm doing at the moment, but am just wafting along for a while.
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