Wednesday, January 16, 2013
making Pauline's covers
Pauline is a Suffolk writer who asked me create the cover for her first book, Utterly Explosive. If you want to read her book go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utterly-Explosive-Pauline-Manders/dp/1478208414
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Waking to a New Year
Listening for Children
Upstairs I rake sounds through floorboards
tweezing the prosthetic ‘a’ to make sense
of chirps below. My cheeks decipher walls,
a toe tug and time between years.
I count vertebrae,
sink through baklavaian sheets,
sleeping between teenage sounds,
wonder up aisles of half centuries,
while threading chain to sprocket
with bare hands.
RG 1.1.13
Young people
sleeping in the studio. Limited by the trash in the office bin.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Fresco from a drawing
Fresco on lime plastered wattle and daub frame 10 x 12
I've been keeping up my blind drawing, or morning drawing, depending on whether I can grab my glasses. Jane Lewis lent me her copy of Barbara Rae's drawings and that spurred me on to use some colour as I draw. The original drawing was pen with watercolour over and I thought that would be a good starting point for my next attempt at the plaster experiment. It hasn't dried fully yet, so I'm not sure what the final piece will look like but this feels more like me than previous attempts. I like working in wet plaster more than on dry with casein, I think.
pen and watercolour on paper
Figures in response to Delouis
Day one on a 60x40cm canvas. Taking up the idea of the hat again and using memory (open gardens 2012 on Mount Desert Island) and imagination but letting colour, shape and mood lead me. Trying to be me, responding to colour, painting about what interests me, unashamedly: people, landscape, objects, colour, oh everything! What I was really struck and delighted by in Delouis was the way she uses paint. So I'm going to focus on that next. I used my palette knife on the trousers - a departure!
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Complacencies of the peignoir
soft pastel on paper 22 x 24cm
It's easy to avoid things that others scorn. And then I read Messum's catalogue about Nancy DeLouis - she has an upcoming exhibition there and I have to admit feeling affected by her view of the world, a 'feminine' view. It's easy to think you need to change and go a different direction even when you get a thrill out of decorative work. It's easy to see yourself as dated (rehashing) and then you talk to a few fellow women artists and feel that little bit more confident.
I've been getting up early and enjoying those hours of the day before anyone else has risen. I want to do everything, read, write and draw immediately and at the same time. It's often the everyday that take me in.
ZEST OF THE DAY
That hour between
That hour between
fill of day,
nothing of night
Pre-dawn
milky, lemon zest
stolen before
morning peeled
from night
Ideas that feel
like balancing stones
Hope’s black, cold, clear
watery worlds Those
glazed limpet walls,
smooth, brittle lazuli
beads of dawn.
Labels:
Nancy DeLouis,
pastel on paper,
poetry,
Rebecca Guyver,
Wallace Stevens
Friday, November 30, 2012
‘There is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.’
The title of this post is something Giorgio Morandi said, according to Barbara Haskell in her book on Milton Avery. I have been reading. Haskell also refers to Okeefe who said , ‘nothing is less real than realism.’ I have been dreaming about those words and working. I think some of the struggle has been about ensuring, to myself, that I have some skill and that is easy to translate into drawing correctly and perhaps drawing realistically. Diebekorn reminds not to believe in the first thing. I don't BELIEVE in today's beginning oil sketch, but I do know that I need to trust my memory and my sense of colour and not worry about creating 'feminine' art.
Labels:
Diebenkorn,
Haskell,
Morandi,
Okeefe,
Rebecca Guyver
Friday, November 23, 2012
painting in puddles
The plaster experiment has been gnawing away at me so I have kept reading and turned to other media, waiting. Everytime I walked through Hudson's room I would stop and look and feel the beautiful simplicity of the desk, the light, the shirt, the chair, the plaster walls. This morning, finishing Jane's Diebekorn book I began to think about the layers of D's paint and what he said, what he thought: 'the feelings, the desires evoked by the object can in this account, only be remembered by being successfully forgotten and represented in the disguise of successive different transcriptions. Concealing and revising, again, are the means of making meaning.' So, I sanded down the plaster, layers of revisions as an underpaint and took some charcoal to Hudson's room to sketch what mattered. I mixed my casein, pigment and limewater and painted in puddles of water at an image that doesn't look like it will. Obstacles, I love them!
Labels:
casein,
Hudson's room,
lime plaster,
pigment,
Rebecca Guyver
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