Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Maybe how an idea begins to evolve
I went through my sketchbooks and gessoed out all the stuff that wasn't interesting. In a few places I glued shapes of a different colour over dark places. The rose red was part of a paint chip I'd collected in Maine a few summers ago. I blended a bit of bluey gouache into the gesso.This morning I woke early and found some objects that would work with the direction of the red. The objects were not red.
Next I scanned the new image and printed it onto some cartridge paper. I worked without reference to the objects with a Matisse book opened.
Labels:
collage,
gesso,
Gouache,
Matisse,
permanent marker,
Rebecca Guyver
All over the place
Mail art sent to Theresa (the letter project)
Looking at Dorothy Eisner, finding an old collage and rereading Barbara Haskell's Milton Avery book, and borowing Jane's Barbara Rae drawings, reminded me that working in all directions from a range of sources, life, drawings, photos, imagination, monotypes, collages is the way I always worked before. I have been feeling so serious and so self-conscious, mailart the only place I feel I really play or experiment. License. Didn't I do my MA thesis on that? And besides aren't women born to multi-task? In the midst of all this theorising I went to a talk by Daniel Sturgis at First Site in Colchester. Interesting but in a funny way dispiriting. Only response is to fill all the moments of doubt with frenetic making. So here is some 'bad art' or in process art that might be the stimulus for the next thing. Jeni, from UEA would be proud with my 'messiness' (Jeni thought I tidied up my thought process, revealing only semi-finished ideas in my journals). Perhaps suffering in public is the honest way. Or maybe I shoud have a continual bonfire ablaze?
Labels:
collage,
Daniel Sturgis,
Dorothy Eisner,
doubt,
drawing,
painting,
Rebecca Guyver,
the letter project
Sunday, November 4, 2012
After the dinner party
I love when you notice something and have to stop everything and draw it. That's what happened today. We had some friends over last night so I bought flowers and the tablecloth was still on the table. I collaged a few pieces of pastel paper onto the beige background, thinking of those picaso collages but then behaved as if I didn't have wonderful planes of flat colour and was carried away by the colour and pattern, as ever.
Responding to what's around me
Struggling with this idea of using the material our house is built of to say something. I am using recycled frames to create the armature for the 'fresco' to live in. The problem is I have to learn how to use the new materials. The first image is a wet fresco using lime water and pigment. The second landscape is the same plaster that I worked on top of with casein/ lime water/putty and pigment. I think you need to work wet, so spraying the plaster and that becomes confusing as the image is much darker, with endless ghosts. Then there's the issue of the image itself which is hum drum... We are having grey days! I think my confusion is pretty apparent and not sure the limited palette of lime-resistant pigments will allow me to work to my strengths!
I visited the Hepworth Wakefield earlier in the week and was utterly inspired. Her hospital drawings are full of ideas that I might be able to translate here, but let's face it this idea will need lots more application! http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/oct/25/exhibitionist-art-shows
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Painting Dialogue
Cheryl Penn has a marvelous mail art exhibition on at the moment. Here is the line from the essay in her online catalog that sparked an idea for me -
'Firstly, one is – or isn’t born a Postal Person. Perhaps letter writing is genetic? Secondly, mail art is the perfect vehicle for the dissemination of incomplete ideas and thirdly, mail art helps formulate ones own art practice – well it certainly has mine.’ Cheryl Penn
Today is my 23rd anniversary and I woke up thinking that I'm going to try using mailart (to Patrick) as a way to think about my own developing ideas on painting. We'll see how it goes but please go and look at Cheryl's catalog. It is superb and the articles by other mail artists are wonderful too!
http://www.cherylpenn.com/Mail_Art_Makes_The_World_a_Town___Catalogue_by_Cheryl_Penn_(South_Africa).pdf
What I'm reading
A poet-friend of mine sent me a collection by Anna Adams. This poem seems so relevant to all we do in mail art/ visual poetry, trashpo, etc... I keep reading it and thought some of you might like it too:
BLURB
Think of caseworms in their streams
gathering stray bric-a-brac –
sandgrain, leafscrap, broken stick,
to disguise their tender forms:
Binding tesserae of trash
close, to make a carapace –
intricate mosaic face –
covering near-naked flesh.
Think of poets in the street
finding unconsidered snatches –
phrases overheard – for patches
to be stitched into a coat
That close-fits transparent thought.
They obsessively construct
intellectual artefacts,
Babel-towers to support
Flickerings of inner flame,
shielding it from unkind winds,
circumstances, obtuse minds,
housing fire in name on name –
Images purloined from Dream –
using what they hear, touch, see,
to embody mystery.
Poems swim upstream through Time,
Keeping in the present tense,
hearing still the ever-young
poets of archaic tongue
making one harmonious sense.
Permutations of the rhymes
work like genes in DNA
keeping poetry OK,
constantly renewing themes
in contemporary dress:
Death and Love, and Love and Death,
Poets’ truth, till our least breath,
sings our dole of consciousness.
Anna Adams: Green Resistance NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
(1996: Enitharmon)
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
What is an Epistolarium?
Was asked by Theresa at The Letter Project to consider the epistolarium. Monday morning I ranted: Try reading it with one breath.
1
Episolarium Rant
A room with a view
solarium, aquarium, agrarian
Place where ideas grow
weave, weft, hook
Paper words
between people
More practical than missiles
or pistols
Plural, equal, altered
born, hatched, spawned
missives.
Epistolarium ovarian
women words
organic shapes
Victorian? Matissian?
hothouse determination
Uprising of letters
an anti-Lariam, epistolarium
a community
of eco egos
Epicenter of postal prodding
to the edges of knowing and beyond
This morning the
epistolarium woke me up.
2
Epistolarium of my mind
Waking
me
shaking
me
sheet-shimmying
me
Levitating
liberating
translating
my days
Hemisphere
within
letters
hanging
words
colliding
form-finding
sound-binding
Winking
smiling
Spinning its
trance
A monotype made on a mirror (Akua Kolor and Akua Intaglio).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)