Drawing at Nayland Farm

 Daily pastel drawing.  I'm getting my eye in, noticing the colours more - intune with nature, not even minding that the day is getting shorter.

word and image ping pong

Nayland Farm from the back 04/10/2012

My Punctuation

The glissading hull to our Somes Sound buoy,

man-boy gaff hooking the bow to the picturesque scene.

Apple-bobbing down the aisles of the orchard,

Lifting perfect windfalls from their beds of grass.

Fingers of arthritic trees sparkling in squares around fields.

Granite till underfoot . How loud thawing is.

A red tulip’s imperfect navigation as it rises

through the middle of wooden tangles, surprising the taupe of life.

Rebecca Moss Guyver

27 September, 2012

Have been doing what I do with kids, visual and word ping pong.  Reading, drawing, painting, writing and again.

Now that they're all gone: let's begin

NOW THAT THEY’RE  ALL GONE: LETS BEGIN

Before shaking, cajoling,

wrestling the key

in the studio lock,

get the gesso

and paint a wide streak

down the laundry pile.

Use that erasure brush

so the heaving basket

disappears.

Don’t notice the dishes;

forgo the broom;

avoid eye contact

with the flowers that droop

their pollen in tears

on the kitchen table.

Pause before stepping

into this other room.

Try! Unlearn the duty

you’ve spelt in your sleep.

Unhook its badge!

Delicately rest its body

in a velvet box

hidden in a sock.

Rebecca Guyver

25 September, 2012

blind drawing

I've lost my glasses so mornings are blurry.  I have been making anew habit of doing 'blind drawings' in the hour or so when I wake up.  They are B & W, using permanent archival ink pens on cartridge paper.  Later I scan and print them and have been working backinto them with colour.  I'm crazy about clear gesso at the moment for its transparency and because it creates such muted colour.

I\ve been doing two every morning and selecting on to use as my mailart. This was the second from the first day and it must have had something splashed on it.  It had a snow like quality so I worked back into it.

With Peter Lloyd-Jones in mind I looked at the kitchen table for inspiration.

I have done a few others but in this one I decided to add something that wasn't really in the view and to use some heightened, perhaps not so naturalistic colour to the image.  Then I nudged the colour a bit more in photoshop.

Trying to tame new ink

So inspiring to visit six stunning gardens yesterday.  Today it rained so was indoors more than usual and found time to think about some of the motifs from the day.  The sunhat was a recurring theme.

These new Akua Kolor inks just aren't behaving the way they did in England, so I am having to work back into prints.

These are postcard size but perhaps I can take some of the ideas and scale them up or translate them into a different material.

Mailart Makes the World a Town

I've been considering Cheryl Penn's 

http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/ 

mailart exhibition and celebratory zine for some time now.  I thought I was supposed to make four pages and I just couldn't find a way to do this until I got to Cranberry island. I borrowed and read a copy of the Black Mountain College pamphlet #4 about Ray Johnson and the final pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. 

I collected some lines from the pamphlet:

'Ray touched the letter 'm' which was an intitial of mother.'

Ultimately the most satisfying art for him was the art of friendship.'

'The signs along the street or highway were like art supplies for him.'

'He took a piece fromt he whole.'

Then I set off on a letter safari up the Crnaberry road.

These two images put together in a particular way form the first page.

Because I believed I was creating a series of four pages (hadn't read things properly) I wanted to create a progression towards the inevitable 'Mailart makes the world a town' and my world of lettuce was an image I began in England, dazzled by the leaves in my garden. There is also a nod to trashpo.

Marianne North was a Victorian painter/explore/plant hunter and her book Vision of Eden is a great read. She created a room of flower paintings a Kew in order to share the beauty of the world with all.

Finally the Island Mailart exhibition.

In order to make each pair of pitcures (Ray + salad) and (Marianne+exhibition) I had to integrate some of the imagery from the other pair.  If you are a Zine recipient - you might see how I worked it all out.

missing letter!

5/6 of these arrived on Cranberry Island for the Island Mailart Exhibition.  Apparentl 'L' is outstanding.  Why does that happen and how will it change things?

Island Castaway?

When I was in Kenya Sabra sent me a card of Christo's wrapping of Manhattan - one of my islands.  A paint sample colour took me to Christo.  The word castaway  made me hear the theme tune from Gilligan's island.  Did you know they only ran for three seasons? It felt like my whole childhood. As a teen Patrick Denver came to Cranberry Island, my real island, for the summer.  Patrick was John Denver's son.  John Denver was Gilligan.  We had Gilligan junior on our island.

Making Meaning with Abstract Ideas

I'm following the conversations on IUOMA more now and getting to know some of the artists and their work.  I find it inspirational! I get things in the post and these provoke reactions and experiments.  On some days i have an idea and I pursue it.  On others, everything that has been feeding me rattles around in that intuitive space.  I do much more abstract playing. This declared itself as a landscape, I called it Sea View.  But what if it were turned this way...

Conversation in Studio?
Conversation with inner self in studio?

Early morning. Not a creature was stirring so I needed to be quiet too. Nothing but a permanent marker and an envelope from the recycling house - gouache later.  Light, clutter, peace. Mother's day.

mail outgoing

My backlog of mailart had become a bit like the ironing pile. I will feel so light when I get these in the post. I could have saved 20% in postage if only I'd been more methodical. These backs show my new 'batches' approach to the B side of mailart.

Show us your Artspace still life

One of my latest Mailart 365 groups is called

Show us your Artspace

It is reassuring to see that most of the people making mailart, although attempting to order their world, look as though they work in a creative frenzy that creates a fair bit of chaos. I found lots of evidence of this in my own studio.  This mess still life pleases me.

More good mail

Cheryl Penn, a Vispo (Visual Poet), painter, mailartist was one of the organisers of the collaborative mailart book I made recently through IUOMA (International Union of Mailartists).  She sent me two pieces of vispo painted mailart today! I am trying to visualise her studio in South Africa...  It must be an exciting place! Two of the images are sewn pieces of the original canvas of the photograph sewn to the other side. Wow! Beautiful and original! But was my explantion clear?

Definately a good mail day

I get quite a bit of mailart these days, but this one from my darkroom pal, John Nordell, a Massachusetts photographer/art educator which came today is pretty special.  Not only did he have to spend a lot on stamps (it's letter/A4 size) he also must have spent a lot of time taking his christmas card envelopes apart.  Very tactile, colourful and fun!  Thanks John.

VISPO Collaborative book

Keep the cacophony

of

anit-figurative

noise 

at bay

Express emotional 

tonbality

in colour

Play with 

space

The VISPO (Visual Poetry) collaborative book project has helped me to reconnect with Richard Diebenkorn's work and I've learned much that I've filtered and tried to respond to in my pages.  

For Christmas I received Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series. 

For those of you who don't know, Diebenkorn lived in California.  He spent time at Stanford University, where I studied painting and drawing.  His contemporaries were some of my professors.  They were from the 'California School': Frank Lobdell, Keith Boyle and Nathan Olivera.  Olivera and Lobdell taught me to use monotype.  They also made monotypes with Diebenkorn. As I read the essays in the Ocean Park book I began to see my Stanford experience from a new angle.  familiar things I'd heard from Lobdell, Olivera and Boyle came back and fell into a new context. At Stanford there was a strong tradition of life drawing, a place that Diebenkorn came from.  Interestingly, Diebenkorn stopped working figuratively once he embarked on the Ocean Park series.  I am at a crossroads as have just moved into a big, beautiful studio with much light.  It was a similar impetus that triggered Diebenkorn's shift. I am curious to see the impact of a place on work, imagery and meaning. The back page (shown here) is an inkjet transfer of the view from my studio drawing table after I had completed the monotype for the front One of the interesting things I learned about Diebenkorn was that he was one of the first artists to see the world by air.  A govt scheme took him up in a plane to see the California landscape from a plane. those layers of experience do leave their mark... Not surprisingly,Diebenkorn's work was called 'visual poetry' by one critic.  One of the essays in the book is by Peter Levitt, poet etc... 'Richard Diebenkorn and the poetics of place'.  Wow what a piece of writing!  

So much fun to be involved in a collaborative project. So wonderful to have so much to learn and so much to explore ahead!