Sketchbook walk - two galleries

Meeting at Bethnal Green station, we hopped on a bus to get to Chisenhale Gallery - the Caragh Thuring exhibition was highly recommended - she is "a painter's painter", much given to depicting windows, especially the large picture windows in suburban Dutch homes, presenting them as portraits of their owners. Other works "emphasise the canvas as an area to be mapped". (A 2013 interview is here, a 2014 video here - "the painting is resolved in the process of actually doing it, and you never know what the result is going to be so that's the pleasure of making it".)

Interesting that the paintings were hung back to back in the middle of the room. Trying to read the red writing, there was an "aha" moment on realising the words were a list of the churches in the City of London - on the canvas behind the visible one, the writing is unbroken by any sort of "window". The words sit as solid and immovable as the churches themselves, says the exhibition blurb.

The bricks proved frustrating to reproduce - do you start with the mass and divide it up, or build it up, brick by brick? 

The exhibition is on till 1 February.

Then to Campoli Presti, which is showing Nick Mauss (till 10 January). He "draws in space" with metal and gesso, and also uses plaster on a support of metal mesh as a base for his drawings.

2D and 3D drawing

Colour copy

Mine has a bit of the skylight too

In this 2012 interview, Mauss says: " fragments read as intensities of attention. Whatever is depicted in partial form is assumed to be more important than any other part of the undepicted whole. Perhaps this is a reason I keep returning to drawings, because the distribution of attention is so uneven. In my own drawings the fragment is only sometimes a representation or study. It's a kind of fixation, a pause from which one can spin out. An arrangement of fragments on a page collapses various attentions into one simultaneous reading, resonating like an emblem."

Coffee was at the Museum of Childhood, at a time when most of the children had been taken home already -

 There was time for some colourful play, based on the floor pattern -

After which I wandered round till I found this "doll with a voice" which I'd drawn oh-so-faintly some time ago, and worked on that drawing a bit -

until they rang the bell that heralded closing time. Maybe this is one of those drawings that never gets finished -

And the same might be true for one started, again so-faintly, in the Crypt of St Martins in the Fields, way back in May -

As Caragh Thuring said in the video mentioned above, "you just get to the point where you can't do any more and the painting tells you whether it's finished, or unfinished." Hmm, have to think about that....

The remaining "empty" page had been prepared with bits of collage but was never used for drawing; it got further collage from the cut-outs of the "grid structure"-

I consider that spread finished - and the sketchbook is now full. The finishing date has been added to the cover. Another A4 hardback sketchbook is waiting, both for museum drawing and for sketchbook walking - the former is ongoing, the latter resumes in the new year.