CQ summer school - continued

Collaged and held down with cellulose paste, here are my conglomerations of paper and fabric, drying in the sun -
During a coffee break I'd used the plastic that held paint used for monoprinting, doing a bit of layering and adding some hand stitch - that piece got forgotten in the excitement of making the bigger pieces, but got its own smaller setting (about A4 size) -
Some momogami - papers thoroughly crushed, ready to be inked on the back to get colour coming through - I'll use these later, sometime...
Demonstration of using windows to select pieces to cut out and recombine -...another demo of machining from the back, to get surprising placements of motifs -
And at the end, laying out the work and discussing it -
Cas suggested we put the pieces away for at least a week. That's my excuse for not having a photograph of the version developed with stitching ...

There was a bit of time to go round and see what the other workshops had produced - this is Edwinna Mackinnon's dyeing workshop, using potassium permanganate for browns and of course indigo -
Linda Miller's machine stitching - very intensive! -
Summer school has always been a great weekend - long may it prosper!

Time passes

...experiences and photos accumulate. Too many to keep up with; life is good. But now that I have a moment, this computer (a very ancient Mac laptop) doesn't let me post photos to the blog, or even download photos from my camera. That will have to wait.

As this blog is an aide-memoire for me, I'll quickly note the important events of the past week or so, in chronological order.
Monday 28 June - talk at Jerwood Space - David Mach and ?Giles ?? about "making"; followed by an unremarkable week
Friday 2 July - "Star Book" course at City Lit with Nesta Davies - I'd double-booked, forgetting that my train to the CQ summer school (nr Preston) left at 1.30, but took away paper for making the book later
Friday 2 July to Sunday 4 July - course at summer school with Cas Holmes
Monday 5 July - talk at Jerwood Space about selecting their "Contemporary Makers" exhibition
Tuesday 6 July - kerfuffle and many phonecalls about a bonfire lit by builders next door; making couscous, broad bean, spinach and feta salad for lunch with Vicky; home-made pizza party (Thomas's friends) in the evening
Wednesday 7 July - to V&A with Sue to see "Architects' small spaces" - by chance there was a lunchtime lecture by the curator; then to the preview of the Farnham degree show at the Bargehouse (this involved a walk across Hungerford Bridge and along the South Bank - always lots going on there)
Thursday 8 July - a trip in the "other direction" on the Bakerloo line (for the TraveWriting sketchbook, which is now half full), then from the end of the line into town to meet Jo and look at art along Cork Street - Matisse, Paula Rego, Andy Warhol, Pierre Soulages, Luis Tomasello, John Piper, Mark Boardman, Annabel Gault - and by chance David Nash, one of my art heroes, was talking about his work that evening and tickets were available
Friday 9 July - "Crossed Structure Binding" course at City Lit with Nesta Davies - result, two books (before the class, finally a chance to make the star book from the previous week - got it done but didn't follow the instructions entirely correctly)
Saturday 10 July - time is running out for getting the ESE journal together, so I spent all day on that; in the evening, made some folded books with tiny scraps of fabric sewn onto paper
Sunday 11 July - more folded books; frustration with ancient computer; trip to Brent Cross and unexpected purchase of wine-dark patent-leather shoes for Self and of a panama hat for Sir

The printmaking course I've signed up for, next week, might not run (too few enrolled), which may be an opportunity for catching up with everything else.

Workshop at CQ summer school - 1

"Work" started on Friday evening. Cas (Holmes) took us out into the walled garden and had us drawing without lifting the pen off the paper - a very freeing exercise. Back at our tables, we spent some time "translating" the drawing onto some of the papers we'd brought with us -Ready to get going on Saturday morning. It's always hard to know how much to bring along to a workshop -
We monoprinted, using a plastic bag to brush out the ink onto, and did relief prints -
The doily is from the tea-tray at breakfast. I put tissue under it when printing the holey bits and got a nice abstract stencilled design. Other bits of tissue were the resists from monoprints - the acrylic paint on them could then be used to stick the tissue back onto the print. The bits of fabric are printed with the end of a pen and the edge of a lid.

The other resist I used on the monoprint was a ginkgo leaf. At coffee break I collected some different leaves to use for relief printing. Getting the paint onto this one (with a brush) left a nice random pattern on the newspaper -
Next - how to use the papers we'd printed and fabrics we'd brought. Cas demonstrated using cellulose paste to layer up. The advantage (over pva) is that it's reversible - even when dry, you can prise apart the layers to insert thing, or remove bits altogether. Best materials to use are thin, natural materials - rather than synthetics.
Then we got on with our own layering up.

Imagination and time

"Imagination seems to project time so that the present is already a part of history. The past is made alive through art." A quote from Noguchi, who revived the traditional Japanese akari lamp - now ubiquitous.

7/7 memories

A sad day: five years ago 52 people lost their lives, and more than 700 were injured, in the London bombings (more than you want to know is here). A No.30 bus blew up outside my office building, the British Medical Association - 13 dead.
The building has been repaired; a plaque marks the spot -
Londoners rallied: "They're not going to disrupt our city!" and defiantly got on with life as usual.

One man and his serger

My neglected serger/overlocker is finally getting used - by my son for making T-shirts, prior to printing them:
Stage 2:
Rear view, with logo:A T-shirt in a heavier double-knit is proving more difficult altogether - but it's all part of the learning curve - for me too, as my knowledge of sewing knit fabric is practically non-existent.

Art I like - Fred Williams' red landscapes

I blogged about Australian artis Fred Williams a couple of years ago (here). Before getting down to work this morning I'd like to revist his "red landscapes" - the Pilbara series.

Painted in 1981, they were hanging in a large room in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne when I visited (wish I'd spent longer there...)

Iron-ore deposits in the Pilbara region, in the extreme north west of Australia, make the soil red. Williams went there in 1979, as large-scale mining was just getting going. This article talks about his experiences and the genesis of the paintings:

"Williams was fascinated by the spindly vegetation of the Pilbara. Trees in Australia, he once remarked, looked as if they sat on the earth rather than grew from it. While in the Pilbara he spent quite some time, he said, “trying to work out a kind of symbol for the fascinating white trunked small gum”. The calligraphic shorthand that he developed to describe the tree occurs several times in Red Landscape, where it takes on almost anthropomorphic qualities, like a struggling figure. The rest of the vegetation is painted as smudges or blots and at the line of the horizon these become actually detached from the land, as if to suggest the vulnerability the painter saw in the landscape."

The 18 gouaches (some of more than 100 Williams made on the spot) and 13 paintings (done in his studio) were donated to the gallery by Rio Tinto.

I'd really like to get the book, which is out of print ... will try to find it in an art library first.

Greenery

Spent the weekend at Alston Hall, near Preston - at the much-awaited CQ summer school - it lived up to expectations. My room was way up high - here's the view, and some Victorian fancy architectural stuff, including a drainpipe straight out of Gormenghast, or maybe Dr Seuss -Topiary in the grounds -
The view across the fields -
And what great skies we had -
... including a 15-minute torrential downpour... but only one. It's a bit of a letdown to be back in the big city. I lived in Yorkshire for several years and still love the north.

Crossing signals

It's ok for horses and cyclists to cross. Horses - because this is on the route of the Horse Guards to the Changing the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Usually it's just a green man.

But in Berlin, it's an Ampelmaennchen (on some riverside deckchairs; I neglected to photograph the real thing) -"More human, more chirpy than the green man on Western pedestrian lights, he is East Germany’s most popular and enduring survivor, one of the few symbols of the old communist state to resist the tide of German unification and to make a name for himself in the West." He first appeared in 1961, and is now appearing on signals in former West Berlin.

Getting back to the UK: I won't go into the fascinating differences between puffin, pelican, toucan, pegasus, and zebra crossings ... or thehistory of the failed panda crossing ... but you may be interested to know that the photo (at Hyde Park Corner) is both a toucan and a pegasus crossing. Why toucan for bicycles?? ... because "two can".

And then there are the Belisha beacons....

Colourful cities

London NW1 -Paris, along the Canal St Martin -

Warning

A shop on my street has a smiley-warning... Its been closed due to power failure for a while now. Quite a nice paint job.

Some doors of Portland Place, W1

Berlin

'tis the season

... for ice cream. Love the giant size -That one is in London; they have them in Berlin too -

A green thought

... in a green shade - not in Andrew Marvell's Garden, but in The Green Park, central London.

British builders

As seen in Soho.

Dyeing outdoors

With all the sunshine we've been having (wow it's summer!) there has been discussion on the CQ list of indigo vats and other dyeing. I don't know what the scientific effect of leaving the dyebath in hot sunshine is, but it seems like an incentive to do something usefully messy, and I'd like some more black(ish) and sludgy colours - and to finally use some of the white cotton sheets and tablecloths that have been accumulating -I dug out the dye bucket, removed some hardened clay (remnant of sculpture course), and set out to follow this method: "I dyed around a metre of fairly thick pre-washed cotton by dissolving 3 tablespoons of soda ash in a litre of water, then I added a litre of salt solution (that's a litre of hot water with 250 grammes cheap salt). I mixed 3 teaspoons of black Procion with an eighth of Scarlet and an eighth of Golden Yellow and dissolved it in some fairly hand hot water, making it up to a litre once the powder was all dissolved. Once all these were combined in the bucket I added the dry fabric and moved it around every 5 mins or so for half and hour; then I left it out in the sun to cook. It was out there for four hours."

While gathering supplies and materials, I discovered a packet of Dylon black (recommended for getting a true black!) and an unopened jar of discharge paste that must be several years old by now -First hitch to the plans: the clouds had moved in. Second hitch: although I've been collecting old tablecloths etc with the express purpose of dyeing them, it's surprisingly hard to cut them up! Deep breath, and - ! Some crunching and a few elastic bands later, and we're ready - dye is mixed and bucket is sitting on the windowsill to await heating by the occasional sunshine -
While I sat at the computer and did some paid work, the dye (sun or no sun) sat and did its own work.

Every fabric reacts differently... and they always look most gorgeous when they're wet. It was late evening by the time I took the fabric out and rinsed it off (washing with a bit of metapex/synthrapol) -But this morning, when they'd dried, the story was more "shades of grey" than "black and blue" -
These were white cottons dating back to the 60s, and two bits of beigey linen. Perhaps they will become areas of cloud -