Tuesday is drawing day - glass gallery, V&A, last week

I chose to "collect" candlesticks, 18th century candlesticks, largely because of the bent brown candles here and there in the display -

White glass - in imitation of porcelain, which had just come into popularity. The flowers on this were minutely painted, wonderful -

 My candlestick collection -

The glass "blobs" turned objects upside down and concentrated the alternation of dark and light made by the windows and walls. So even when the glass had a "simple" shape, there we lots going on.

I didn't draw this one, though -

18th century Spanish candlestick

As there were only three of us, we were able to go to the Friends' Room, which was much quieter than the cafe with its tiled, sound-reflective surfaces -

I may have said this before, but one of the best things about drawing in a small group, and showing what we've done, is the exposure to the others' chosen objects. Mike was looking intently at the contemporary glass -

Room 129 (via)

and Janet had chosen what turned out to be toy bugles -

as well as the swirly bottles on the lower shelf.

After coffee we continued drawing ... I got out some colour and immersed myself in voluptuous greenness -

Many of the cases are in the process of rearrangement and relabelling, and these objects had no label, nor have I been able to find the image online.

Jerwood Drawing Prize

The 2014 exhibition finished on 26 October; another show, with yet more interesting drawing, will be along next year. It's a show that's always worth seeing, as "drawing" is an almost limitless category of artistic practice. The winner this year was a sound piece ... very hard to photograph! Although "drawing" can be many things - including gesture that leaves no trace - I'm just not sure whether sound falls into that category - what do you think?

That said, these caught my eye -

Enigma II by Hilary Ellis
"The use of thread as a medium contributes to the individuality of the marks,
 bringing another dimension to the repetitive process," she says.

Untitled (for Ian Welsh) by Alex Chalmers

Zoe Maslen, "The Absents Presence, Hair Drawing"
Pencil, 250 x 150 cm

Charcoal drawings beguile with the qualities of the medium

Hugh Gillan, "Heap" (with detail)
Charcoal pencil on gesso, sanded and erased and built up again - 

"this continual process slowly eroded the fragile gesso ground,

echoing the ruined environment"

There are no owls #1 by Gary Edwards
with a layer of reflections

detail of the gouged surface
"What concerns me is the patina, building up layers of graphite, working and reworking,
adding and taking away, creating histories of mark making" says the artist

Download the catalogue here. Page 28 shows Hannah Downing's magnificent oak tree, which gleamed and glistened when you looked up into the graphite rendering of its branches.

Reading places

"Where does your father do his barnacles?" said Charles Darwin's son, visiting the home of his friend, whose father did not have a study.

Where do you do your reading? Or perhaps you don't read, or have books any more, what with all the seductions of modern media.

As a child, it was my delight to wake up on a Saturday morning and read in bed, finishing the book started the night before. Now, it's my delight to read in the bath of a morning.

A recent library-sale bargain is ideal for this - John Sutherland's "Is Heathcliff a Murderer: great puzzles in 19th-century fiction" - 34 essays based on books one could hardly not know about but may have not read or mostly forgotten.  "Periodic Tales" is a fascinating history of the discovery of the elements in the periodic table; in "Feathers: the evolution of a natural miracle" field biology meets cultural history (including a chapter on the quill pen); "Bright Earth" is about the history of colours and pigments; Berger's "About Looking" consists of essays from the 1970s, sometimes still provocative. Twyla Tharp's creativity book is about to leave the building, but Tim Ingold (Being Alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description) has to stay - I find my pencil marks showing previous reading(s) of certain sections, but obviously haven't absorbed it all yet. "Allusions" and "Saints" are good for a quick dip.

As well as in the bath, I like to read in bed -

I'm glad to have some library books there - one on mainly Renaissance portraits, some essays on American art by John Updike, and a biography of artist John Piper and his literary wife, Myfanwy - as well as picture books: a thin volume on Fred Williams, Chinese and Arabic calligraphy, Chinese prints, the work of Rebecca Salter, a history of glass. As for those lying on top - one is a biography of Grayson Perry but I have no idea about the others.

My third reading place is at the table, usually over breakfast -

mainly because it's easier to spread out a magazine - this one is World of Interiors (January issue), and I liked the way these pages were laid out, with all the white space. On the right is "fabric storage" in the home of a fashion designer; elsewhere in the issue is an article on a pastel-making workshop which at its height made 1,650 colours. Articles like that are little jewels gleaming among  ueber-expensive furniture, fabrics, etc, both in articles and advertisements - touch of reality [of a sort] among the "wonderful" interiors that are in a different world ... escapism is the name of the game.

Electrical inspection

Buildings insurance requires an electrical inspection every now and then. If you don't have the certificate, you might not get recompense in case of a fire that might have been caused by faulty electrics. 

The electrician has been, and tested all the plugs and all the lights. Finding the plugs in the studio took me quite a while, and required the moving of several drawers - fortunately some are on wheels - and of things like a bookbinding press (very heavy) and a metal sewing machine (also very heavy). 

Apart from the embarrassment of not knowing where the sockets/plugs are, there's the embarrassment of discovering that those sockets you never need to access (because you plug into the extensions that run off them) are reposing amid a welter of dust bunnies. Ah well, it's a chance for a good clean-up!

The studio is now in complete turmoil -

Thanks to the brightness outside, and the darkness of the photo, you are spared most of the chaos, but it's all sitting there waiting to be put back.

The elusive socket was in the furthest corner, the junction of the worktop and the table-under-the-window -

This will be the last thing to be set to rights. Pulling furniture away from walls in the other rooms has revealed too much dust, too much shoddy housework. One room is cleaned and restored to sanity ... only one so far ... and despite infusions of chocolate, I'm exhausted by the effort!

But these things need doing - at worst, faulty electrics lead to fires or electrocution - you don't want to risk it. Here are some FAQs about electrical testing, and here is a list of what people around the UK have been charging for doing it.

The commonest fault, the electrician said, was that there was a break in the earthing. And we have this. How to find out where it is, so it can be fixed? Floors might have to come up, he said. Which we had done for the new boiler, four years ago, that needed a new pipe from the street to (of course) the furthest point away from the street. Nor was this done thoroughly - the cable that should earth the gas pipe hadn't been included in the installation. 

All rather depressing, but at least the sun was shining today. I shall have another piece of chocolate, set the timer for 15 minutes, and carry on with rounding up those dust bunnies.

Not quite the year's journal quilts

As I made each journal quilt - the aim being to make one a month - I stacked them on the shelf. When I laid them all out, there were 15. Three of these are not "official" JQs ... fortunately I'd pinned a label on the back of each with their title and month. The official ones will be photographed one day soon.

The series title is "High Horizons".

The joy of grids

Going on from the simple structural drawings from one of the early galleries in the sketchbook walk

Charcoal mirrored on the opposite page, simply through closing the book

incorporating the "cages" that were part of Susan Hefuna's "Cairotraces" show -

I started cutting through the layers in various ways. Joining printouts of various magnifications of my drawings, for instance; cutting through sections, putting coloured paper behind the cutouts, looking through the holes -

Blowing up photographs, cutting out the various layers separately (with plain sheets under the top copy)

 which leads to grids that can interact with each other -

 and with other drawn grids -which can be photographed and printed out and cut through ... on and on (perhaps) -

Plan A is to use them as monoprinting, as for the cut-out maps in the Monoprint and Handstitch course last summer. It might be sensible to "seal" the flimsy papers with a coat of acrylic paint (=plastic) before finding the hard way that they tear all to readily when lifted off the almost-dry plate. 

Plan B is to enlarge the grids and translate them into textile layers ... not sure how (or if) this will happen.

Yet another plan is to keep drawing and try to get some real depth happening. The holes in the centre of each side really help with this. It's those holes that caught my interest in the first place. As though something could wind in and out and around and back in again, an endless ribbon tying itself up in knots. A path that crosses and recrosses [a badly-walked maze?]. Something to think about during insomnia.

A lot of these units, joined, could make a nightmare labyrinth - small holes high up to crawl through, the meshwork-layers making the path totally unclear. Something NOT to think about during insomnia.

Poetry Thursday - Air and Light and Time and Space by Charles Bukowski

See the rest of the illustrated version (by Gavin Aung Thang of Zen Pencils) here

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

”– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

- Charles Bukowski (via)

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) wrote quite a few poems about the artist's life, both visual artists and writers, and on the myths of creativity, as above. He himself was given a "salary" of $100 a month to enable him to quit the day job and focus on writing, aged 49; you can read what happened next here, but you've already guessed that the boy done good.

The admirable "Brain Pickings" blog has quite a few posts about Bukowski, and more of his poems - find them all here.

Around town

Christmas lights, Sloane Square

Halls of residence, University of East London
(across the river from City Airport)

That 50s wine bar feeling - Kilburn High Road

Small old dolls, Museum of London

Side entrance to Morley Gallery - it was once a pub

A tiny shoe woven from a map by Polly Pollock

More small desirable art objects at Microtopia, Kingsgate Studios

Red-barked tree in Queens Park
(the sort of thing you walk past every day and suddenly notice)

Tuesday is drawing day - Museum of London

Last Tuesday I settled down in a quiet, spacious corner of the Museum of London, and that was where Jo and then Jill found me bent over my book, as close to the case as I could get  -

(Thanks for the photo, Jill)

 On my previous visit I'd glimpsed some rich embroidery -

 A closer look - it was the cuff (only) I set out to draw -

 but it rather got away from me, to the point where I was rendering just about every stitch. With a feeble attempt at blue velvet, and just a suggestion of the red on the waistcoat -

Also in the case was the hatbox (and those reflections are of the horses that are part of the State Coach display) -

The postillion's jacket, elsewhere, dates to 1863. "The Lord Mayor's coach is drawn by three pairs of horses. The postillion rides on the left horse of the front pair." -

 Drawing done, we gathered for coffee and out came the books -

 The cafe's sandwich bags were discussed at length -

On the way out we looked at the objects that inspired each of us. For Jill, the "before and after" paintings of soldiers going out to India in the 1850s -

 For Jo, an imaginative view of a carriage on the Underground, by Timo Lehtonen -

And what of the experience of drawing all that goldwork? For the first hour and a half I found it absorbing, seeing how the light hit the threads and how the lie of the threads angled the gleam of the gold. I was mentally stitching it, without the labour of keeping the threads under control. If it took this long to draw, how long would it have taken to stitch! Yet I felt it would be much more satisfying to be stitching it than drawing ... once I'd learned the technique. Same with drawing though - you don't "learn the technique" in an afternoon! I did get very fed up with oak leaves and acorns and clover leaves and roses and elm(?) leaves, but pushed through to the end. My regret is not being able to capture the velvety-ness ... you can do that only by stroking the fabric...

Desiderata: Single-tasking

"Responding to electronic interruptions is giving away your power and is the ultimate form of procrastination in contemporary life." (via)

We know that multi-tasking is a problem for most people. You just can't be as efficient when you have to switch from task to task  as when you focus on just one thing. But often, especially for mothers and in certain jobs, single-tasking is a luxury ... or seen as wasteful.

A multi-tasker of necessity, c.1990

Research shows that multi-tasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%, and lead to more mistakes. Through stress, it can damage your health. Through using up "working memory" it can dampen creativity.

As you get older, doing two things at once can be linked to memory problems: "When University of California San Francisco researchers [in 2011] asked participants to study one scene, but then abruptly switched to a different image, people ages 60 to 80 had a harder time than those in their 20s and 30s disengaging from the second picture and remembering details about the first. As the brain ages, researchers say, it has a harder time getting back on track after even a brief detour." (via)

Still, there are ways to help yourself...

- switch off electronic notifications

- do things in batches - getting into the mindset saves time

- pay attention to the person you're talking to - don't let the phone or texts interrupt the conversation

- pay attention to your food, rather than eating in front of the tv or at the computer

- if you start something, don't stop till you've finished it ("only handle it once")

"Almost everything except true emergencies can wait 

until you have completed what you are working on."