15 minute sketches

Bread to bake, so had half an hour spare, en route to drawing.  I purloined this pad and fixed pastel colours on each page with rubbing alcohol just before the timer sounded.  Next the task was to use about 5 pastels to record some part of a scene at the dock, primarily using colour in 15 minutes. I want to do three of these evry day until the book is filled. The pad pages are roughly 4X4.5".

Below a glimpse of what happens at the dock at night, written 31st July, 2013.

Night Swimming in Maine

Limb-tangle of night jumpers

pouring their bodies rapid fire

into the sea.

‘It’s a party down there,’

says the birthday girl,

breathlessly.

Light pools on bikini shoulders.

Wring of towel.

Barnacle tiptoe up stairs.

And squeals as water

peels from backs,

Labrador-style.

We listen from the house

Imagining our smaller frames

Stepping off the dock into the night air.

Light on table

What could be better than spending the morning edging a beautiful garden, midday the time to record light on a table, followed by a walk to the end of the island and back under the ripple of a hundred flags with my niece, Molly? Peter Lloyd Jones http://www.peterlloyd-jones.co.uk (who I happened upon painting the activity around the church) agreed with me that Cranberry Island is paradise.

noticing how figurative and abstract intersect

Pastel on paper 10.5 X 7.5"

Fused plastic 6.75 x 6.75"

acrylic on cardboard with fused plastic stitching  6X8"

An addition to Maine Time

Fog time

thick light 

presses down

Boat engines rumble

We leave footprints

across the lawn 

Back with my internal landscape

Getting accustomed to Maine time happens on a number of levels.  There is the physical shift from Greenwich Meantime to Eastern Standard Time; there is the totally open-endedness of time that five weeks brings; but also, time is never really your own when you are with lots of people you love.  I am thinking that I will make a new book for Cheryl Penn's project http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/ an Encyclopaedia of Everything entitled Maine Time - my last book to Cheryl was about tree time http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/?p=2178

Maine always seems to be a fertile place for me, so many memories, associations and a landscape of endless inspiration.  On the first morning as I 'came too' in the light of the barn, far too early but what was my morning... 

Daybreak swim through night-tide

daylight punctuation

 diamond barn ends

The sound of unfamiliar gulls

I was talking to Susan Landor Keegin http://susanlandorkeegin.blogspot.com last night about how one can't really plan what inspires and how that can result in a 'messy' (conflicted) range of images that don't seem to go together.  It's no surprise I began with figurative pastels and abstract fused plastic.

View from Barn Window -pastel on paper 7.5 X 10"

Maine landscape 2013 (1) -fused plastic 7.5 X 5.5

Maine landscape 2013 (2) fused plastic 5 X 4.5

Fusepo story

In this house newly discovered plastic provides speculation, discovery and sometimes new ideas. We've had a few barbecues lately (the weather is amazing at the moment) and with a different range of food comes different packaging, different plastic.  I also thought to use bag seams. While we've enjoyed the summer evenings , I've had even less time with my iron, my paints, my glue stick.  In one stolen evening I tested a few new plastics and incorporated the paste papers I have been making. 

The interplay between images and words, always there for me, came out differently here.

A day without clouds

A day without clouds in the rearview mirror.

Some after image of museum trays,

lost objects catching light through dust.

I turn the mirror slowly refracting the angle

to configure a hedge, pond repetitions,

embers burning their opaque blue.

The whole androgyny of twilight or morn

dappled in moons.  And then

a bird raises its newspaper wings and sings.

Fusepo story 1

10^th July, 2013

'Fusepo' response

I'm beginning to feel as if I am painting with plastic.  I guess it's like any material, you get to know it and you can use it as your handwriting. 

Yesterday we took the train back from Exeter.  I had my little zipper bag of mail art materials and on the second train we had a table to ourselves so I collaged. Last night between activities I spent a bit of time in the studio with my iron and some of the plastic I foudn in Exeter.  I wanted to capture the (poetry) the colour  and feeling of the collage in fused plastic: FUSEPO. 

Trashquilt portrait

In Maine my making was mostly limited to cooking.  However, at both ends of the day I found myself in the kitchen bursting with the need to experiment in some way and an hour or two with everyone in bed.  I carved stamps and combined them with coloured markers and zentagle-like black and white patterns. I carved figures and lobsters, butterflies and flowers. 

The only things I brought back to England were some walnuts, a few plastic bags and some wonderful cheap shaped erasers as well as a stack of adhesive foam.  You can press into the foam to create stamps and the figure in this stamp is made with that. I cut out the shape of a figure I glanced at in a magazine and decorated her with patterns. The way the stamp prints is determined by the pressure - each print varies quite a lot.

Tonight I decided to sandwich a couple of the prints in some fused plastic.  This is about 4X4.

Enough inspiration to last 'til summer...

Maine in the off-season has a different kind of light.  The colours are different, surprising, more fleeting. Some trees feel positively asian as they bud.  The houses need painting. 

It's quieter and there is more time, fewer people, more rain, a different pace altogether. 

When most everything was done, I spent far too much time hovering over images on Pinterest, my new toy, but I also went out to the barn, quite cold in the off-season, and arranged my supplies.  

There was a tatty piece of shelf liner that made it into my plastic stash and in a frenzied moment I tried it out. It is the melon colour and did you know a straw can be ironed flat?

There's some travel ahead and I have the sad feeling that the summer is over when it hasn't even arrived yet.  I have the sense that perhaps that prick of loss is a good thing and will inspire me, along with the light and the colour and the beautiful objects that are so familiar but that I forget in between. Spending time with my artist mother will stand me in good stead for the next few months.

They warned me I'd have to choose

My Academe Mind

Splintering, unfettering, my academe mind

is choking on words.

I watch it slip, drip, congeal,

coagulate in dark flaky patches

on the parquet floor.

Mono-syllabic as a prick of blood,

I think anecdotally, unquantifiably

eye off the lure, beyond the school,

bashing ideas in fish tail swipes,

gulping sea mouths of Harmattan sand. 

RG May 1st, 2013

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I have been two-footedly in the visual world lately. It's as though my thinking brain is atrophying and if I try to think about anything too deeply it's disorienting.  It has been a long time since I lived in my head in that way. Today I found a whole bunch of notes from my dissertation. They were precise and  thoughtful. The primary material was fabulous but I had to read it a few times to remember the significance and to glean the meaning.  I spend lots of time convincing others that the visual and written can converge but when you are two-footed in one it's harder to shift than you think.

Painting by plastic

In a whimsical departure, I was inspired by my plastic to paint a larger canvas 15 1/2 X 20). As I worked from the plastic I tried to let my love of Milton Avery and Richard Diebenkorn (and of course Pierre Bonnard) guide me in interpreting the little cardboard sketch with sewn plastic. The cardboard pieces (in the previous post) began as a series of 'free' colour studies.   When I began painting, my colour study mind went out the window. 

The thing is, for me this was a satisfying experience. So, I know I'm not finished with this idea and I think I can see what to do next. The title of this post 'painting by plastic' alludes to painting by numbers.  Working from a little image is a bit like working from a photograph and in my mind you have to be careful not to 'paint by number', copying what is front of you without thinking about what the painting needs - a challenge.

Before I take this idea forward, I need to do some more little things and after my conversation with potter friend Caroline, I think I'm ready to let go of a few things in the mail this time!

Recycled plastic landscape collage

I haven't been sending out much mail art lately.  I need to get some work together for a little upcoming show and what's intersting me are the little things I make (thinking I'll send them out).  

This morning I decided to do a colour study using a bit of leftover plastic as a starting point. I inteded to whip these off and send them out.  I decided I would choose three colours in the plastic and mix them to make different values and hues and then sew the plastic to the surface. The background painting began as a middle value from mixing two of the dominant colours in the plastic. As I continued to paint, they seem to have been inspired by Diebenkorn and my fused plastic quilts. 

The bad news is that I have been forbidden from sending these out as well. 

Fused Plastic Interpretation 1

One of the things about fused plastic and monotypes that I enjoy is that there are surprises sometimes, and how even though these surprises haven't been intentional, sometimes they are believable and often the result has a particular energy I long for.  

Making a completely abstract painting has always felt like something I don't do, mostly I think because I don't understand what is believable in my own non-representational work. Not sure why, because I can be moved equally by abstract and figurative work of others.

That's why I decided to interpret a fused plastic landscape today.