Recent encounters with art books- David Nash

These were in the Serpentine Gallery in 1995. My son liked how the pieces seem to have burnt their way through the wall.
This piece is called Downpour
and this is another Downpour -
Views of Nash's studio, an old chapel in North Wales, with some of the pieces he has made over the past 40 years --
In the book Nash talked about the qualities of particular types of wood, and how that influenced what he did with them. And about where he gets his wood - from dead, dying, or already-cut-down trees - sometimes from what he calls "wood quarries". There are many pictures of "wooden boulder" (started 1978) on its 25-year journey down to the sea, including one just before it disappeared -

Rearrangement

In these currently cloudy, gloomy days, I need to sit in maximum daylight to be able to see what I'm handsewing. So I moved the sewing machine table, so that the ironing board could go under the window. The strip lights under the shelves will be useful. And the table just fits between the sets of drawers that hold threads (on the left) and paints etc (on the right). To clear room for the sewing table, heaps of fabric ended up on the bed, and lots of things joined the permanent clutter on the worktable (bottom left).

I wanted to do some cutting out, so had to clear off the worktable. Here are some of the things that turned up: a small picture of flowers --
a bagful of beads, bought at least a year ago and promptly forgotten -
bobbins for the PQ1500, from the Brother stand at FoQ last year -- two people conferred on what the right size was, and they agreed this was it -- but they were wrong! Don't know if I can be bothered to take them back...
Less than an hour after starting, here's the cleared table. Frequently used supplies (and the lifetime accumulation of sketchbooks) are on the shelves behind, big pieces of paper (and my handyperson DIY tools) on the shelves underneath.
This is as good as it gets. I'll have to guard against using that nice bare corner as a dumping ground.

There are, of course, a few corners that these photos don't reveal. (And a bedful of heaps of fabric.) We all say "I have too much" - and use max.20% of what's on hand - but paring it down is going to be a big job.

Rainflowers

At going-home-time on this grey day, the roads were wet, but the pavements were still dry under the trees; it was a gently misting rain, gathering into big drops on the flowers, drops not yet heavy enough to fall off.Wonderful silvery drops on leaves, and a fragile poppy looking as though it had taken a battering -But best of all were the roses -

Summer school

CQ's summer school weekend was held at Harper Adams (agricultural) College in Newport, Shropshire. Getting there wasn't half the fun - being there was very fun, though. "Something from nothing" was tutored by Bobby Britnell, whose work I have long admired. (The workshops run by Ruth Issett and Janet Edmonds looked good, too!)

To start with, Bobby told us to join two pieces of paper in as many ways as possible. Then we changed scale and developed one of those. The four pieces of paper slotted into a square was my starting point - the smaller ones are the square cut in half at an angle, slotted at various distances from the ends, and sometimes with the corners curled.The next day we treated papers in various ways -top left: resist (wax crayon) under ink on grey tissue; top right, Quink on a dry brush, lightly pulled across at an angle; bottom left, fax paper crumpled and gently ironed; bottom right, graphite on heavy paper, rubbed with linseed oil.

Then Bobby had the whole class do a drawing exercise, starting by putting a square onto paper with charcoal, then adding another square, and taking a circle out of the middle, and adding ... and taking out... Some people loved doing this, and some hated it - but don't the finished drawings look good! -The next stage was to use our own papers to make one of our structures. I think we suspected that eventually we'd be drawing these -- sure enough, here they all are, on the back wall:
I used heavy watercolour paper, putting the "box" near one end of the strips -- and it fell into a bird shape. Folding strips of the flimsier papers, and curling the corners, made a different sort of bird shape. I was inspired to use the qualities of the papers by reading, in one of the many books Bobby brought along for us to take to our rooms for bedtime reading, about how David Nash exploited the particular qualities of the different types of trees he uses for his sculpture.

Bobby suggested we photograph our structures in a different environment. The sun was shining, so I took my birds out into the air (it was quite windy) and tried to get them to hold still. For the grand finale of the weekend, each group set up a display of work and we wandered from room to room to see it all.
What will I carry forward from this workshop? More charcoal drawing, certainly. More thinking about the qualities of papers and types of cloth, and about using cloth-as-cloth. And it would be fun to make some of those "owls" in heavy plastic and wire them to the branches of the hedge ... and see if any passers-by notice ...

Where on earth is this?

Kalahari desert, Namibia - one of 30 abstract images chosen from the 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite, and displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000. The website is a bit slow to load, but worth visiting.

update (2016) - that website seems to have disappeared, but the "earth as art" exhibitions have been held several times. Try this one instead, from 2005, or this more recent one.

A love of patterning

An explosion of threads

Imagined and real

We carry around "visual schema" - how we think things appear, relying on how we think the world is organised - they come in handy when we're asked to "draw something from your imagination". Here's a visual schema of a forest -and here's one possible reality. Not so tidy, in fact it looks a bit chaotic, but it has its own organising principles.Hence the importance of stopping to draw - a photograph is useful too, but the looking and thinking of making the drawing is so much better!

Using precious silks

In this silk quilt, the wide dupion strips are stamped with Chinese characters - flower, beauty, spirit, words like that from a set of commercial stamps, emulating the four-character idioms so common in Chinese. Narrower strips are cut from my extensive collection of dupion, and the "pictures" are precious bits of vintage silks, most passed on to me by Sally (thank you!).

I used a combination of strip piecing and foundation piecing - chunks of curtain interlining did double duty as foundation and wadding. Here it is, taking shape on my design floor:This is a view of the inside. The base fabric is cut into smaller bits to use as foundation for each section, then these are sewn together and the seams held open by simple, invisible-on-the-outside stitching. And sometimes when the silk seemed to be fraying a bit much, I added zigzag "just in case" -
The "chunks" allow the vertical strips to be sewn in easily.

The backing is on, and it's pinned on the wall beside the computer, catching the odd glance as I decide what sort of quilting it will get -
Hmm, one side seems to be longer than the other! The colours are mujch more vivid than in these photos - perhaps too vivid?

Ah, Paris...

Found this in draft form in the Posts folder. A few more pix from the Paris trip, now 6 weeks ago.

There was some rain - The kiosks all seemed to be advertising only the film Sex and the City. Which by now has come and gone. But graffiti is eternal, self-renewing -
Is this jolly paininting graffiti too?
And here's a big mural, trompe l'oeil on a public art scale -
Of course I can't resist collecting pix of "dames & dawgs" -

More, better bobbles

After un-knitting the wide tubular scarf, and re-knitting it narrower, it looks like this. About 1/5th done, being carried everywhere and pulled out at odd moments - and people doseem to think it's an odd bit of knitting. I'm not happy with the thick stripes, so have made the bobbles smaller and less frequent, and am now combining orange bobbles with pink ones - with a view to gradually making the bobbles purple, and then green and big again at the other end of the piece. It's an experiment, ok?

Photobooks

A small exhibition at the British Museum, of Japanese photobooks. In addition to the actual book in its vitrine, and background information, there's a book of laminated pages to interact with.

Photobooks are sequences of pictures, bound together to tell a story. The British Museum website has a slideshow of one of them, by Hosoe Eikoh.

Quite apart from the images, and the history, it makes you think about how to really use those many photos stored (and invisible) in the computer. The exhibition is on until 10 August, and makes an interesting counterpart to the American prints at the other end of the museum.

Quilting by the Lake

In the QBL quilt gallery you'll see some fabulous work, including this piece by Pamela Mostek, which fills me with awe and envy. Hurry on over to the QBL website, find your favourite, and report back!

Even better, hurry on over to New York for this two-week quilting event - it sounds wonderful.

Dragonfly eyes

"Dragonfly eyes" are multifaceted lenses set in an eyepiece, usually found in toyshops. Look through them to see the world transformed. Twist them a little, move them slightly, and you get ever changing views.
They're great for discovering different combinations and proportions of colour. Or general inspiration for patchwork shapes.

Also in the designing vein -- who'd have thought soap and a scrubber could be a quilting inspiration for quilting patterns?

Bird artist

Robert Gillmore has illustrated over 100 books in the last 50 years. He draws his inspiration from the wildlife and distinct countryside of his North Norfolk home and his prints capture the intimate behaviour of birds and mammals in this landscape.

I was very tempted to buy this bookin which he talks about his working methods - he uses linocuts - and the inspiration behind 90 of his prints. Here's a sample page -
but a couple of cards will have to do for now:

It's good to garden

"To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves."

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

Putting seeds in the earth and seeing them grow is marvellous. Making a garden is satisfying. Growing vegetables is wonderful. And making compost is magic.

Even having a window box makes a big difference! Can't find my windowbox photos, so here's something rather grander - Kew Gardens, no less....and The Manor, Hemingford Grey -

Out of Africa

Recently I got to meet another internet acquaintance -- Glenda, whose Amafu hand-dyed fabrics are well known in South Africa and indeed in UK, came to London and brought these along ...Thank you, Glenda -- this colourway complements the discharged pieces I did at Bob Adams' workshop at FoQ last year; I'm really looking forward to working with these fabrics and finally starting to use the discharged pieces too ... the combination is set to generate some creative sparks.

The "little traveller" is made by people affected by HIV in South Africa. By making these, women have been able to support their families and send their children to school. An inspiring initiative.

Brightly bobbled

Hanks of hand-dyed wool are too tempting, the beautiful colours changing from one end to the other. But I'm finding them disappointing when knitted up.

This is half a hank that went from blue-green through plum and terracotta to raspberry, and looked so gorgeous when it was a hank -The different patterns are due to fewer or more stitches on the needle (the overall numbers change inexplicably when I knit lace patterns) and also to starting out on impossibly small needles. It's nearly finished and I'm fed up with it! And in the middle, it gets very slushy....

But there is still half a hank of this delicate, part-mohair wool to use up. While winding it I had various thoughts about how the multicoloured feature of such wool could be used to advantage. With this one, the lengths dyed various colours are fairly consistent. Pick one colour and showcase it by literally pulling it out of the background. Raspberries, anyone? Here's a closeup, on circular needles:
But by the time you read this, it will be pulled back, and rather fewer stitches cast on. The idea is to make a tubular, double-sided scarf, and 120 stitches will make it too wide.

It'll be interesting to see how many stitches are needed to get the bobbles falling into a pleasing pattern.