Downtime mail art making and letting go

When I had just graduated, my father offered the advice that I should never give anything away because doing that devalues what the artist makes. It made sense at the time.  Luckily I came to my senses! 

My mail art is a way to unwind.  It's playful and as I make it I am thinking about who I should send it to. The who is it for, makes we work differently.  In general I never think I'll do this this time because someone might buy it. I (most artists?)  just don't work that way.  With mail art there is human connection and rather than taking away, for me this adds a dimension, allows me empathise in another way.

Above are twelve quickly worked pieces (postcard size) which I began with mounted photos I had found at the car boot sale and then cut up a few years ago as postcards to make mail art on. The black and white textures and shapes provided an intuitive base for playing with shape and colour.  

I owe lots of mail art and I never make mail art that I don't like myself or that I don't like making.  I gave myself yesterday evening to make some mail art and made four of these postcards.  (They are arranged in order with the first at the top).  I gave myself a few hours this afternoon again. Inevitably I will keep some. But they are mail art and most will be mailed away and only this photo and the process will remain.

Struggling with Green

Green Vases Flowers and Bowl, Oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

Getting Green right in a painting and in reproduction seems to be tricky. A long time ago I remember telling my father that I thought green was the hardest colour. It went something like this:  I had been making a monoprint of my mother (bent over gardening) between the house and the barn.  It was late in the season and the grass was fading but I decided the grass should be a yellow green. My dad walked by and I was in that tormented state when nothing seems to fit with anything else in the picture. I asked him what colour he thought was the most difficult to make work.  He asked me in reply and I told him, green. 'I thought you were going to say that,' he said. In the end I reconciled the green in some way and the monoprint hangs in the bathroom, reminding me of the conversation and him. 

For some reason I challenged myself to work through colours for the month of May.  From experience I find yellow and lime green are tough to make work in any quanity in a picture so I began there.  The sketchbook page, below, works better for me than the painting above. I painted all day yesterday and in the end wiped down large areas and changed the composition.  The colour isn't quite what it is.  The green on the right is deeper.  It's quite wet after working back into it this morning, so it needs some time before I can think about it again. I came across Annie Williams on Pinterest https://www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk/artists/109-annie-williams/overview/

and had been thinking about her work as I put things together to draw.

Making the most of an opportunity

Green Vases and Bowl, 24 x 22 cm, pastel on paper

I wasn't able to start drawing today until too late to finish before the light disappeared . I'm not sure if I will return to this or begin another version. Today was about green.

It's been a busy few weeks and it feels as if I have had no time to do anything other than tie up loose ends: framing, typing up bios and price lists, putting together a portfolio, picking up work, and then hanging two exhibitions and attending them.

When I can't spend all my time making work it can feel frustrating, but that is ridiculous!  All of that other stuff is part of the whole and I've learned that if I see time as opportunity then it's easier to feel good about the non-painting activities.

Last month I made three opportunities.  I took a pre-selected pastel down to the NEAC annual exhibition for final selection.  I put together a portfolio and submitted it for the New English Drawing Scholarship and I submitted an altered sketchbook for the Annual Radley Sketchbook Exhibition (Parker Harris) and one of those three opportunities was successful.  You just never know, and I find that by making the opportunities I apply myself differently and with zeal and that makes new opportunities.

The exhibition at Craftco is exciting.  I love seeing my 2D work (plastic collages) with ceramics.  Since I know Caroline's work, I have been thinking about it as I've worked and I am pleased with the way it looks hung and together.

Craftco , Southwold, Exhibition through May 30th

Color possesses me

The title for this piece comes from a Paul Klee quote, ' Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter." 

I began with the latest pieces of plastic I had acquired: a Marks and Spencer's bag, a Jacobs cream crackers packet, a bag of mixed nuts, salad bags, and a Doriano biscuit wrapper.  I added a bit of that kelly green from an old RA mailing (not members this year) because I needed that. I had been thinking about Klee, Mali Morris - she's coming to talk in Colchester on Friday, Howard Hodgkin and Rothko.  In my mind these people gravitate towards bold shapes and colours. The Marks and Spencer's bag and my recent foray into grids for Nichola Orlick's exhibit in Kyoto was still in the back of my mind. I had finished putting a portfolio together for something coming up, so felt light, happy.  It was happy hour.

With my stitching I like to accentuate colour relationships, to move them back, bring them forward and the colours in the frame seemed to make the most of the inner life of the happy hour. It was hard to keep it simple but I resisted the temptation to complicate things.

High Stile was where we stayed in the Lakes.  Happy Hour in HIgh Style says Jazz to me.

The above is copied from my post in Dining on Plastic: http://diningonplastic.blogspot.co.uk
(sometimes I like to highlight the overlap between my experiments in plastic and all the other experiments I make in other media … apologies if you see it in two places.  

This bouquet was sent to me for Mother's Day by our adorable children from a florist in Kersey, a village nearby. I was still quite sick on Mother's Day and rushing to prepare for our trip to the Lakes, but I managed to record something about it in my new altered sketchbook:

The flowers travelled in the Defender up to the Lakes, back down and were beautiful until Saturday morning when I went out and picked a bouquet with my niece, Gracie. You might recognise some of the objects, reconfigured.  I glued some paper onto the vase. 

Spring Green and Book, pastel on paper,  A4

Library with Red Sarong - oil on six canvases

Library with Red Sarong  - oil on six canvases 40 x 30cm each

Paintings are problems and as I've got older I have learned to accept imperfection, to compromise and to let go.  It used to be that I loved starting things and dreaded seeing them through to their conclusion.  I would paint over everything at the first sign of something that didn't work. Now, if I have to move something, late into the painting or take it out completely it isn't such a drama. If a colour doesn't work I'll look for a long time and then begin testing alternatives. Believablity is what matters more than everything else. And I don't mean, 'is it realistic?'

Painting these six canvases has been an interesting problem and coming back and forth to it for a week has been fun. When I composed the still life I thought about the composition of each of the panels so had done some of the work before I began.  I knew quite a lot about the subject because I had made a big pastel drawing of it the week before. I only had to move things around a little as I worked. 

In order to paint something so long I had to move it and myself lots, so my perspective was changing more than usual but I tried not to let that bother me, as long as it was believable. There were lots of patterns and how much to simplify, how true to the colours I saw I wanted them to be, and how to tie everything together in terms of colour, shape and value were the main problems.

I anticipated taking the pieces apart to work on the individual parts, but in the end I decided this time I wouldn't.  Next time I will.  That will be a different experiment. I am very curious to see what they look like framed individually next to each other,how that will change things, and I'm sure that will inform my next experiment.

A few days ago, when I was beginning to despair of the red, I started a new sketchbook and invented new colours, stood at a totally different angle and unwinded with my pastels.

Hyacinths, Tulips and Daffodils

So later today I'll pack up the still life and begin thinking about what comes next. 

Grids of sorts

At 16 - I went to the Animal Fair, Battisford, England, 2017

Later in the year one of my mail art friends, Nichola Orlick is hosting an exhibition at a gallery in Kobe, Japan. It is called Half Hundred Swing and is an homage to Joseph Cornell. We have been asked to make box collages. I have been thinking about it for some time and I earmarked this weekend to complete it. I read a book about Cornell Vision of Spiritual Order by Lindsay Blair that I found in a charity shop four or five years ago.  Before I began working on the collage, I  browsed throught the book and wrote down these words: 'childhood, swan, owl, bunny, body, self, repetition, arrangement, demarcation, compartmentalisation, colour, coding, tangential relationships, people, outside, set rules, ritual, alternative worlds.'

I had been saving a box that I found around Christmas and what I had been thinking about was how I could divide up the space to create depth using fused plastic. I thought I could use some mount board in some way. I got out my big bin of  plastic and started pulling pieces out looking for inspiration. I'm not sure you can see but each of the rectangles is a different height. It was fun and I think it may lead to something else later on. Arranging the rectangles was tricky.  I think  in the future playing more with colour, light and height could be interesting. This time I wanted to use some of the motifs Cornell was interested in.

At the end of last week, I began painting my six 40 x 30 canvases. I decided to attach them together to begin with and so far I haven't taken them apart.  I think I will.  Such a long canvas is unwieldy and it is difficult to see things, also the idea is six canvases, in the way Hockney did that. It's still early days and my goal is to make each of the rectangles work in itself.  The bouquet in the middle looks nothing like it did when I began, all the flowers were in different places and I was struggling with that.  That panel is the weakest one so far. Having spent so long drawing a version of the arrangement has meant that I have solved some of the problems and am able to focus on the colour and the shapes in a different way. I nearly changed the red because I've used a lot of red lately, but now that I am working on it I am loving the red.

Still Red Room

Still Red Room, pastel on fabriano 64 x 46 cm

One reason I love to work from life is that I can create something that reminds me of a place.  When I put together a still life I am inventing a place and trying to get it to feel real.  This time, without meaning to, I put many barriers in my way to success. 

I was determined to use some yellow lillies that two of my Albanian friends, who I know from Suffolk Refugee Support, gave me as a present.  I have spoken about having a hard time making yellow and red work for me, in garden and in drawings so by choosing a red, a very red, backdrop I was bringing this to a head. There were also some flourescent orange roses in the bouquet and again, that was troublesome. Additionally as I worked I realised, there were too many open cups and something too small in the foreground of the set up; so with a mix of invention, addition and seeing colour differently to the way it existed in front of me, I think I found a way to resolve things. For me, the overall feeling of this is quite still, maybe serious in a camp kind of way. Perhaps I could have varied the marks a bit more, but in order for it to be believable, this was what I found.

I'm going to get some new flowers later on so that tomorrow I can begin on the six canvases!