Flocks of birds

Many flocks, and individual birds, in a video by Steven Siegel, whose day job is as a pediatrician.

At about 6 minutes 20 seconds, swans doing their long takeoff from a lake -

Wonderful images. Wonderful birds. Watch it here.

Car boot sale

And the booty:

 A chinese puzzle, a grubby metal jug, a road atlas, a German-English technical dictionary, GM Trevelyan's History of England (1946 printing), and sheet music of undetermined date - the most recent of the three names inside the cover is 1975.

Quilters with guns - microtag guns, that is!

Putting together CQ's "Diversity" quilt; the theme is "British-ness" as this is for a European Quilt Association exhibition -

Sixty squares of 20cm chosen from the many submitted by CQ members, chosen to work together ... and didn't it take a lot of thought and rearrangement to get the squares to work together!

Those are the microtag guns on the table. They made the putting together possible - using the tags to attach the squares to a sheet of heavyweight Lutradur. Hilary then added basting on the back to make sure the squares didn't shift about. The result is truly "diverse" - see it at the Quilt Museum, 4 May until September.

Oddly put

Also seen (but not photographed):

Hot and cold meals
available all day

Book du jour - letterpress erasure

The text is seeping back in - word by word, the type is being turned over and the hidden words are emerging. There's a system for figuring out what comes next, trying to keep some sense (and some suspense) in the text -

A sheet comes off the proofing press -

The italic words are one of those "accidents", and not an entirely happy one. At the end of the setting, 9 Es and 5 As were needed, and no chunks of unreturned Times 18pt could be found, so the options were to use a different typeface - for the end bit, or here and there throughout - or to use italic for some words. I think I made the wrong choice! After decades of editing in a house style where italic was NOT permitted for emphasis, I'm very suspicious of using italic at all. (btw, that house style also frowned on the use of "very" - and it's true, "very" is very seldom needed.)

Next, I'll make the book, and then consider whether the text can be used in a different way, or is worth resetting and reprinting.

Ink everywhere

At the bus stop, for instance.

Book du jour - ink plus

Yesterday newspaper (very fragile, even pulpy, when wet) - today onionskin, with the addition of various pens and pencils and sticks of graphite -

 It didn't absorb the ink as readily as newspaper, even diluted with water. One or other of the pens wasn't permanent. The gold edge, though, isn't likely to have come from the gold pencil -

I did like the gold writing and used it for another onionskin book, this time torn against the grain (to see if pages would curl differently). What to write? The loopy line was quite satisfying - simple but varied in size, slant, spacing, and rhythm of writing. It showed through the page a little.

 It's tempting to dip the whole book into water, spine first, to see if the ink will dissolve and give off those orange "flames".

At the end of the second session, a total of nine books. Soon mounts up!

Last week at college

It was mid-point review for the full-timers. Each person brought in a finished work. Before the group discussion, there was time to have a good read -

Then we put each item in turn on the table and spent 10 minutes talking about each work. The maker was not allowed to contribute.

A recipe to share - identical books that include upside-down text -

 A mysterious object and an unreadable (sealed up) book -

 Cut-out clothing from vintage photographs -

 An anthropomorphic object - an uncloseable book -

Wednesday's lecture was by Anne-marie Creamer, whose video of children dancing at a village feast-day was amazing - and to think she just happened upon it, a stop in a train journey, while having a coffee on a balcony above the square -

See more of her work on her website, including the "paper prologue" to the "Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov" video - and the 7-minute video itself.

Thursday was a quiet, restorative day in the letterpress studio. My typeset "erasure" book is nearing completion.

Book du jour - inky books

The stapled spines of the free evening newspaper do have their uses... The spine was dipped in water and the foredge into black Quink - where ink and water met, the colour separated.

A smaller book similarly treated - then blotted before using the hairdryer on it -

At the end of the session, some very inky books -

 and one less so (completely dipped in water and then the spine dipped in ink) -

Not sure how this fits into "daily journeys" or "line as text" - just experiments, seeing what will happen if....

Editing out

Thinking about artists who have destroyed their work...

Agnes Martin - once she found what worked for her, there was no need to keep the old stuff

Frances Bacon - hardly anything exists that he did before this work in 1944, "Studies for three figures at the base of a crucifixion" - he believed the early work failed to communicate the way he felt about the world -

Susan Hiller's ashes of burnt paintings (1973) -

Yukinori Yanage started as an oil painter but now works with ants, using them as a symbol of work, order and collective activity; sometimes he traces the wanderings of an ant in a confined space over a long period -

There must be many others destroying their work .... using knives or bonfires or overpainting or simply (frugally) remaking.

These reflections rise from reading on Judy Martin's blog: "The artists who have managed to get textiles into the main stream of fine art have been established as fine artists first. Even an artist such as Magdalena Abakanowicz now mutes her textile past."

Book du jour

Experiments with black paper, newsprint, onionskin - and wax, graphite, black quink - using frottage, dripping, flooding, rubbing... The quink makes coppery tones on black paper, and bluey tones on newsprint.

Thinking about dipping a little book into ink. Or, inking it page by page. Various types of ink.

Lucky find?

You don't expect to find a horseshoe lying on the Peckham Road.

But is it a horseshoe?

Art I like - Lesley Dill

Some of Lesley Dill's sculptures use paper, some metal, some - like "A Spider Sewed at Night" - are wire -

Many of her works are voluminous (but unwearable) dresses, incorporating words -

Hinged poem dress

Her prints combine the body and language -

In an interview, she says, "You have to work; work to make money to support yourself, to make art you have to be ruthless and disciplined. After ten years of awful art I feel I got lucky. I went to galleries and made friends. Then I got accoladed with galleries. Its really important to exhibit your work."

She also says she reads all the time: "That’s part of the engaged reverie. The reading is where my work comes from. That’s how I found home, from language."

Often I find that reading the words "takes over" the visual aspects of the art, but not so much with Lesley Dill's words and work. Is this because the words don't read easily, and the shapes do?

Unpicking

Seeing Judy Martin's "unpicked stars" on her blog

brought to mind "Withdrawn", the work of Roanna Wells, unpicked embroidery from a wool skirt -

Not an erasure so much as a correction, or a change of mind, of intent - a re-purposing. Or left as a memory? The marks that remain suggest the line of stitching that was once so clear.

Contrails

Patterns in the sky - living between several busy airports, you get to see a lot of contrails. They don't occur right near airports, because the planes have to be high enough to hit cold air.

These contrails are over Florida -

Rainbow contrails (new to me!) -

Admittedly, that's an extreme example, with conditions just right - see more here. The rainbow effect comes from the different optical properties of different sized ice crystals. They are more common with warmer weather and moister air.

A moist environment makes contrails longer-lived (pic from here), and as the wind blows them along they spread out -

Condensation trails first began to appear in skies over Britain in 1940, says this site, and became part of Paul Nash's image of the Battle of Britain -

While researching contrails, I came across some videos of flight patterns, compiled from airline data. These have fascinated me since seeing one in a "digital futures" exhibition at the V&A a couple of years ago. (So many planes in the air at one time - one estimate is a million people on planes at any time, but I don't know where I heard that...)

The most dramatic is the shutdown of US airspace on 9/11, which you can see here  - and the air traffic patterns over Europe during the Iceland volcano eruption are dramatic too - see them here (is the swelling music Tchaikovsky?).

What is worrying is the effect of aviation on climate change - currently jet planes are responsible for 5% of CO2 emissions, and this amount is set to increase. Contrail clouds trap the planet's heat. "Further research is needed..."

Finally, skywriting - call me cynical, but it all looks photoshopped these days...

...though "sky writer trailed by sky editor" (from here) did make me laugh (ruefully) ...

Anagramicism

What can you do with a word? 

A TON IN ASH is a poem by Rob Giampietro in the style of Emmett Williams’s SWEETHEART.

See the entire book at http://linedandunlined.com/files/ton-in-ash.pdf

What Picasso did for British art

Sunday morning found us at a Temple of Art, Tate Britain, paying close attention to the Picasso exhibition. About half the 150 works are by Picasso; the rest by some British artists whose work shows his influence - Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, David Hockney.

Picasso wasn't much known in Britain before the Tate had a show of his work in 1960, but his work appeared in various art journals (which could be seen at bookshops like Zwemmers) and some artists had met him in Paris or seen his work in private collections. 

The works that stick in my mind are the Seated Woman in a Chemise (which is in the Tate's collection)

Ben Nicholson's double profile in a mirror, which doesn't seem to be online - an oil painting, mostly black, with incised lines, and the "grey" areas are reflective, suggesting they are graphite. Here's Nicholson in his Hampstead studio about the time he was doing his profile paintings

Picasso's 'winged bulls' in the ICA guestbook in 1950, which was used as the design for a fundraising scarf (this was also in the British Museum drawing exhibition recently, but I missed seeing it; surely haven't forgotten...?) -

Once back home I made the mistake of reading a review of the show, which suggested (or rather, the quote added by a subeditor did) that Moore is plagiarising Picasso here -

To think it was Picasso himself who said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal."