It looks (kinda) like a book...

Is it art, or advertising? Corner of Bayswater Road and Kensington Mall.

Calligraphic excitement

The ring on the doorbell was the postman, bringing the book by Denise Lach -It opened at random -
I'm very excited and will be spending time with ink, pens, brushes.... living in the liminal area between drawing and writing....

Book du jour

Like last year, I got a small "academic year" diary, and again covered its nasty plastic cover with a bit of leather. Which will immediately start to look grubby - so it needed a case.

Inside the case - just so there's more than blank cardboard! - I wrote out my annoyance at finding that my fountain pen refuses to write (well, it's about 30 years old and has a rather contrary history):

wherearethepenstheindeliblepensthtwon'truboffonthefragileleatherthatbindsmybooksoemptyoftheyeartocomemust therebeareversiontotheubiquuitous(nopunintended)tothelowestcommon(ohsocommon)denominatoroftheonlypentobefoundineveryroomofthehousetheBICperuchasedina12-pacjandscateredblighely,eminentlyfindableandinevitablylose-able,itsinkhardenedwhenretrievedfromanookorcrannyunderthesofabehindthewainscotinacoatpocketamongthecutleryhiddenwiththebestpairofscissorsfallenbehindthedesk--orperhapstakenoutwiththegarbage(nottherecycling)--pensstillneedednotyetsupercededbytoughonkeypadbyavoiemailmessagepensthatpassethallunderstandingandholddrawn-outandwith-drawncontingenciesofpersonalityandvisionyetare,likeadiary,fullofvitalityneedingafuture

Hope I spelt that right. Thank goodness for word spacing, and punctuation!

One day I'll figure out the secret of getting everything accurate, but meanwhile, it works -

The masking tape? To hide the cracks in the folds!

Fabric as a medium for art

Recently there's been a lot of discussion on the SAQA list about using fabric/thread as an art medium - would a quilt work just as well if it was a painting rather than made of fabric? Would an oil painting work as a watercolour? Etc. Olga's post on Ragged Cloth Cafe is definitely worth reading on this subject.

The latest Art Quilt News e-newlsetter had photos of several quilts that would have worked well as paintings, and then this, Layers of Memory by Diane Savona, that felt "right" in fabric -
Perhaps this is because its subject references not just fabric/thread itself but also a lot of attributes, memories, feelings, cultural assumptions that are connected with fabric, emphasised by including objects made of and related to fabric. There are layers of meaning, and the piece is self-referential - it "shows how it was made".

Art in Action

Where to start? What a wonderful event! So many artists taking part, and the whole thing is run by volunteers and so well organised. I went to the website just now and found that despite being there all day, we'd missed out on the Market, which has yet more makers and works to buy. Ah well, "next year". I did bring home a necklace made in Mali and one of Mary Lowry's gorgeous woven-shibori scarves, and about 150 photos, many of them of the patterns made by the tents and many more of the toolkits of the artists.

One high point was the chance to make a drypoint print on perspex, with Barbara Jackson. (I shall be doing more of this!) Tony took photos of the action -

Tony's favourite thing was this hand-built wooden sailing boat - beautiful -

Another high point was Julia Polonski's charcoal and graphite work in the Drawing tent -

Note the very few tools she needed to bring, in contrast to the many brushes and colours in use in the Painting tent -

More later...

Book du jour - unfinished again

Ink (and brushes) and papers. Using vertical strokes. They started looking like crowds, and groups of veiled women (are there any veiled men??) - I'd been hoping to get lowering clouds!

Rethinking the idea of sewing these into a pamphlet. Thinking about the impulse that stops us doing what we'd decided to do, and has us pondering what to do instead.

Lots of questions about the nature of "unfinished" work are chasing each other round inside my head, after a conversation yesterday at Art in Action with Hazel Connors of The Unfinishable project. The things that need moving beyond; or, more ominously, undercurrents that burden your soul; the unrevealed unknown. Sometimes we need rituals, or witnesses, or both ...

Signature cloths

Where does the signature fit on the line between writing and drawing? Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" uses the signature as an example of drawing-that-we-do. One's signature is uniquely expressive - and often illegible.

Lynn Setterington has a project on signatures, arising from signature cloths/quilts. She says:

"My intention is over the next two to three years to work with different groups to investigate, explore and document their responses. This could range from high schools, refugee organisations, to local community health projects. Running in tandem with this will be my own cloths, a personal exploration of identity and belonging."

She also mentions the "book of signatures" by Shuruq Harb, and Harb's comment: “signatures are personal and physical inscriptions, symbolic and romantic gestures, but also visual signs that are used today as information or evidence for verification of someone’s identity”

Some years back - 2007 in fact - I compiled information on signature quilts as the basis of a project in the London region of the UK national quilter's guild (goodness, the info is still on the guild's website!). Unfortunately I can't find a picture of the finished quilt, which contained signatures of nearly 100 of the region's members - or remember whether it was raffled or is still in the region's possession.

Let's end with a "signature" drawing by Saul Steinberg (from here).

Text and subtext in art

What Neo Rauch says about his paintings can apply to art in any medium -

Could you describe the moment when the idea for a picture turns into something definite?

It is a give-and-take between an idea, what one might call “text”, and what is recorded using the medium as “subtext”. I have to ask myself what I expect from painting: should it be subservient to my ideas or a queen that I have to serve? The text, which I regard as a private matter, must be able to stand being dragged diagonally across the canvas. If it loses something along the way, so much the better, since it then gains something that it may have urgently needed: sensuality and a truth that is rooted in non-verbal space.

Do you only give your works a title after they are finished?

Not if a word calls out for a picture. The child must be given a name. You won’t find an Untitled among my works—it is simply disrespectful to the picture, the viewer and, ultimately, to the gallery owner.

Are titles “honey traps” for viewers?

I have to ensure people linger in front of my pictures. Viewers must be rewarded—if people devote time to the picture then they must receive something in return.

Read more about his "socialist realist paintings" here - storytelling with an inscrutable twist - it's Rego-meets-Kitaj, from the perspective of someone who knows about many more UK painters than German ones... Rauch lives in Leipzig, was born in 1941, so his student years were in East Germany.

What the camera sees (through glass)

A painting in the window of a gallery on Old Brompton Road cried out for taking home and looking at for a long time. The best I could do was to find out the artist's name - Helen Booth - and to try to capture the memory.

The camera, though, needed to include the reflection of the other side of the street - and a ghost of the photographer. Behind these layers of the contingent present is the painting, with its own layers of past and present -I'm interested in that overlay, but juxtaposed reflections of buildings and street life surely doesn't fit in with the artist's intention! On her website are her Threads drawings - traces not imprints, a chronology rather than a cross-section -
Some work by John Cage comes to mind. As well as photograph-as-time machine, I seem to be looking for art-as-trace, a sense of the ephemeral ... and am trying to formulate this quest more exactly. The words taken out while writing this post are as informative as the ones left in. The glass that catches reflections is also a filter.

Mind the gap

"This gap between the impulse and vision, and what actually happens, can be so frustrating" I wrote recently in an email. I was thinking of what had happened on Sunday afternoon, when I ran across a picture of some Mbuti bark cloth, a "map" made by a tribe in the Congo.

Years ago it was one of these cloths that gave rise to my Fissures quilt (the one that got left on the train in 2006) - and during the month or so of making it I was so happy to be hand stitching -- it all just flowed ...

Maybe it was this feeling of flow and contentment that I was hoping to achieve on the wet Sunday afternoon. It didn't happen, and thinking about why it didn't might help the "flow and contentment" happen in future.

Hit by the impulse, I thought "yes I want to hand stitch but also I want to finish it this afternoon, so it has to be small - ah, a chance to do a journal quilt!" So I got out my "journal quilt kit", intending to use black fabric for the background and cream or maybe ochre stranded cotton. As I was looking for the thread came the thought: "these JQs are a series and have common components; they include circles, buttons, text - how to combine that with stitching - well maybe I'll leave the stitching for another time and do another spontaneous JQ out of these preselected fabrics" and before you could say Jack Robinson, I had two laid out, using up the bit of black I'd planned to use for the handstitch piece.

That's how it went wrong. I quite enjoyed messing about - but it was messing about (with some less than ideal choices/decisions - variegated thread, for instance), rather than following my intention. One of the JQs did get a bit of "map" into it, from which arose its title Across; the other was done entirely in hand stitch, including the invisible circles quilted onto the black and the diagonal quilting, also invisible. It "Could" have been different - in fact, it will be different in its finished form because it doesn't "feel" finished to me; more work needed.

So, back to that gap - I tried to jump over it, rather than taking time to build a bridge.

The Fissures quilt worked because the vision for it boiled down to "stitch over quilting", and before I got to the stitching stage, I'd done a lot of preparation of the surface - finding cream-coloured cottons, washing them, cutting them up roughly, laying them out to cover the wool backing (two moth-eaten trouser legs!), attaching them with careful machine stitching. All that to make a surface that would be congenial to hand stitch. Then, gathering various dark threads, navy blue and dark green as well as black - cottons and rayons and even some wool. Only then came the pleasure of starting to stitch. I made it up as I went along - all I knew was that some lines should cross the gap, and the two sides should look more different than alike.

I used to carry around a small sewing kit with material for my ongoing "stitch marks" project. It would have been a better use of that wet Sunday to do some more on that....

Book du jour

In the scrapbag was some plasticky, loosely woven, resilient fabric - rather like something you'd use on a screen door. In a bowl on the table were some transparent circles cut from another project. I'd been thinking about clocks. The result is timely -Because of the stitching round them, the circles pop out of (or into) the background. The hands of the clocks are stitched with thick rayon threads in the bobbin, in no particular order or chronology -
After folding, the spine was sewn with a sort of horizontal backstitch (not very "book arts"!) and this sort-of-book has a little black case, very flimsy, to keep it out of harm's way -
Working title: "It's about Time"; I hope this will be a series of some sort, based either on the material or the concept.

Quote for the day - wasting time

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations. - Benjamin Disraeli

Get started on your work before you have a chance to think why you shouldn't.

(Photo from Brompton Cemetery, more of which later, perhaps.)

Community garden

This corner has long been neglected, a wasteland. People were driving up into it and parking their cars there, so the council put up some posts to stop them. It got wilder, stragglier, unsightly in this "nice" neighbourhood. So the residents' association took it in hand, cleared the long grass and brought in plants from their own gardens.

Things found in books

What the camera sees

Fellow travellers were surely bemused to see a camera being held up to knotholes in the fence along the platform at the train station. Most were lost in their sudoku or the celebrity "news" or their ipods, of course ... in the big city, you are invisible ...I'd set the camera to zoom and was intrigued to see what the effect of the size of the hole - and the amount of surround - has on the clarity of the image.
A matter or random framing. Plus there's the bizarre, even silly, connotation that you're spying on the secret life of plants...

Mythical photographs

Elaine Ling is a Canadian doctor who has worked in remote places and has been to Mongolia five times to travel with and photograph people who live in a traditional way, resulting in a book on Mongolia, Land of the Deer Stone. From the interview here you get a sense that as well as skill in photography she has a gift for being at ease with people.

Of the baobab tree, which she photographed in Mali and South Africa, she says: "I am intrigued by the role that this thousand year old giant plays in the lives of its human neighbours. It is an enduring presence, perhaps older than the legends passed down from generation to generation, its roots deeply intertwined with daily existence."

Do go and look at the others - magnificent.

Spotted

... on the train -Includes "little people looking in all directions" - !

This one is altogether rather duller -

Quoting Bachelard

"exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image" (p80)

"The imagination sharpens all of our senses. The imagining attention prepares our attention for instantaneousness." (p87)

"there will always be more things in a closed than in an open box ... it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience." (p88)

"When we accept slight amazement, we prepare ourselves to imagine great amazement and, in the world of the imagination, it becomes normal for an elephant, which is an enormous animal, to come out of a snail shell. It would be exceptional, however, if we were to ask him to got back into it. ... Beauty and magnitude cause spores to swell. ... one of the powers and attraction of smallness lies in the fact that large things can issue from small ones." (p108)

Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of space (1958, tr.1964)

Book du jour

Not quite -

Tony gave me the leftover flyers from his recent exhibition and I had a go at turning them into one of the little cubic books. The sameness of the pages and the thickness and glossiness of the paper somehow isn't as congenial as the hideous variety of a newspaper. The flyers are "too good" as they are and suffer from being fragmented.

I feel the "skeletons" that are left over need something doing with them. Like these two sheets of paper that arrived in different ways one day - one in the post and the other when what I thought was a parcel delivery was actually a "missionary" -

The combination of the bank's warning about boiler room scams and "Will humans ruin this earth" makes a rather poignant "text".

Under the bridge

We went - who knew it would rain so hard! - to see a tall ship that had been in town sail out again. Well, not exactly sail...sort of glide ... I've not seen Tower Bridge open up before.
The ship passed, the bridge closed .... Been there, seen that, took the photos (in the gloom, while juggling an umbrella).

Quite a few people there. Quite exciting, in a patient, wet sort of way.

Here's a view of another such event (smaller ship). And here's a video of the ship sailing into port a few days back. Yes, those are people up along the yards...

Professional goals?

An incomplete list of possible ambitions in an art practice. Many of them can be subdivided, broken down into a series of steps - or even operationalised (to introduce a bit of sociological jargon - in another life, I was tarred with the brush of sociology...).

The goal that happens to come last in the list is probably the most important one. Its corollary is: show up in the studio. Which leads to: keep making work. After all, "work makes work."

1. Make a living.

2. Have a solo exhibition.

3. Be in a group exhibition.

4. Have studio space.

5. Be in an artists' network.

6. Do residencies.

7. Submit work to open exhibitions.

8. Submit work to juried exhibitions.

9. Be invited to submit work to exhibitions.

10. Narrow down my practice.

11. Broaden my practice.

12. Write a book.

13. Teach.

14. Work in an entirely different medium.

15. Win an award.

16. Continue to make work for my own pleasure.

17. Produce [x quantity] of work a week/month/year.

18. be represented by a gallery.

19. take part in an 'open studios' event.

20. run an arts festival.

21. be pals with the movers and shakers in the art world.

22. keep motivated.

(just thought of another: enjoyment --- but, is that "professional"?)

And if your goals are financial, there's an interesting model for breaking them down into a checklist here.

PS - these are not my own professional goals. Those boil down, in regard to art practice, to three: produce;

enjoy; share.

Celebrating the Jubilee Line

Last year, to mark the 30th anniversary of that "grey" line running from Stanmore to Stratford, Art on the Underground put together an exhibition that included writing by Goldsmiths MFA students, "exploring time and its value" -

Julia Calver looked over passengers’ shoulders and read lines from their books. She imagined the objects from these passages speeding along the Jubilee line as though it were a wormhole for time travel through outer space.

Patrick Coyle scrambled familiar London Underground announcements and instructions, spelling out improbable stories and making surprising associations.

Cressida Kocienski traced the route of the Jubilee line above ground on foot, photographing the objects she found along the way, which she has described as imaginary instruments for measuring time. For further visit Cressida's blog

Claire Nichols focused on architectural details and signs at London Bridge Underground station. Her drawings transfer these shapes in space into shapes on paper.

Tamarin Norwood watched passengers passing time on their journeys and rewrote their actions as suggestions for other commuters.

Gemma Sharpe made a number of night-time journeys from London Bridge station after the last Tube. Her text takes the form of a correspondence in which she meditates on the images, thoughts, movements and sounds evoked through such journeys.

It was put together in a leaflet, Timepieces, that was handed out to passengers.

Also given out was a print by Richard Long - One Thing Leads to Another, Everything is Connected,

which gave the title of an exhibition at City Hall of work by Nadia Bettega, John Gerrard, Dryden Goodwin, Richard Long, Daria Martin, Matt Stokes, Goldsmiths MFA Art Writing students, investigating ideas such as time, economics, and travel, and our changing relationship with them over the last 30 years.

At Canary Wharf, John Gerrard's Oil Stick Work showed a wall being painted at the rate of one square metre a day

so that in 2038 the whole building will be a black silhouette.

Daria Martin juxtaposed passengers' responses to a survey of daydreams and photos of objects from the Freud Museum.

Four podcasts of talks associated with the exhibition, London Journeys in time and London Journeys Underground, are available.

Puzzling

In the late 20th century, why have art critics felt they had to write so much more about pictures? Why have pictures become so puzzling? The cause of this excess of writing lies in what pictures have come to mean, and our excessive demand for understanding and desire for clear solutions.

Elkins wants to explain the way that words and pictures differ, how they can be connected, and why some of the familiar parts of the word-picture relation tell only part of the story. For instance, in Pictures and the Words that Fail Them he asks, looking at premodern, non-Western examples , how can we tell if we're looking at pictures or writing? "We bring to any image expectations formed from the reading of written materials" says a review.

Yes, this quoting of reviews means I haven't read much of the book. Partial reading is not always a bad thing - a search to recall Elkins' main points found an interesting article he wrote about emblems - "a high point of organization and systematization in Western pictorial practice" that have "a tendency to deliquesce: to melt into surrounding image practices, gradually losing their attributes ... until nothing is left of them but the memory of what they once were".

But I digress. Digression is all too easy....

The sound of horses' hooves...

...had me grabbing the camera and hurrying to the window. A traditional funeral passing by.

How long does it take to blog?

Someone asked me how long doing the blog took me. There was no quick answer.

Many components are involved. One of the most important is the photos. Once taken, they need to be downloaded - at that point I try to give them tags and/or move them to subject folders. For blog purposes, the ones I plan to use are cropped etc and saved for web in my "blogging" folder.

With the photos comes the idea for the post - and as I process the pix and determine the sequence, the words start to form.

Some ideas come from things seen on the web - and then it's a matter of downloading the image, and making sure I know the website to link to, for attribution.

Once the photos are all in the new post, the words get added. And the links. I try not to get caught up in finding ever more interesting links - they are there for my information, as starting points for further research at another time (but sometimes they send what I intended to say off in another direction...).

When the writing is done and the "publish" button clicked, I check the post on the blog and inevitably there's some small thing that needs changing.

Sometimes I do a series of posts to be published at intervals throughout the week. (It's good to get away from the computer!)

So, if I see a photo on the web and just write one sentence with a link to the site, that can take less than 5 minutes.

But if it's been a busy week at college and I have to get out my notebook and revisit and THINK - as well as prepare a series of photos - and add links, to artists mentioned, for instance - that can take up to 2 hours.

Of course a lot of ideas never get blogged about, even if I've prepared the photos. Periodically I go through the "blogging" folder and put those in the "might use someday" subfolder; the photos actually used go into archive subfolders (by month).

And then, because the blog is also used as my Reflective Journal for college, every few weeks, I go through the blog and put posts into Word files under various topics, and print out the new pages (two per sheet) to add to the "books" of the various topics. When a project is complete, it gets a japanese binding; until then, paper clips hold it together.

For this blog post, though, the words came first and then I went searching for photos. The entire post took half an hour.