Another excuse for wasting time

If you drill down through Blogger stats, you can find where the traffic to your blog comes from. Every now and then I find Pinterest on the list, and am curious to see what image from my blog has been shared in this way.

One particular image is never credited, even though there is a link in the caption -

This is no doubt because it was first picked up way back, when  Pinterest didn't ask for information about the item, and it's this image that has been finding itself onto other boards.

What a good excuse for perusing Pinterest - to find the image and, leaving a comment, give credit where credit is due!

But oh my, I quickly fell out of love with Pinterest, after scrolling through 1500 posts on several boards, and 6000 on one - all these desperately need culling, as many images appeared several times.

Amid all that visual fodder, it was hard to remember just what I was looking for, and (oh folly!) having come to the end, I had to go through the board again in the other direction...

There comes a point, doesn't there, when you simply don't want to see a lot of "irrelevant" work ... you don't want to be distracted from generating your own ideas, looking at and listening to the work in hand. It would be too easy to see something and think "that looks like fun, I'll make one of those" - and then not only have three weeks been lost, but you haven't even done something original, and you've reached a dead end; this is a temptation that must be resisted, there's no need to add yet another copy to the many that fill such Pinterest boards...

As well as the book by Mar Arza (posted January 2014), a little house with ladders by Este Macleod (posted 2009) often pops up and needs tracking down and crediting. In this case it's my fault for using three images and not putting her name in the captions - a link is given at the start of the sequence, but has disappeared from the screen -

More graphite travel lines

The first water-drawing on paper prepared with water-soluble graphite. I'm using 6B and this is grainy paper. The slight change in angle of the paper shows how "slippery" these are to photograph -

Haste and inattention during a change of trains left a disfiguring blob; vigorous application of the eraser left a dull greyness -

Below is graphite on bristol board (v.smooth), held parallel to the window so the light reflects ... you lose the shine in the photo, but do see the lines -

 Same piece, same situation, after erasure - the borders are what was left of the graphite after the masking tape was removed -

 I wonder if careful work with the eraser would make it look more interesting ... or is this idea a dead end? It's certainly a lot of work for very little effect -

The next one is virgin bristol board written on with the graphite stick, then re-traced with the water brush - a "there and back" journey -

Not very interesting, imho.

After watching a couple of videos on using water soluble graphite (here and here) I tried "...into wet" - make a puddle of water, eg when stopped at a station, then write through it till the next station; repeat as needed; no words -

That's a sample ... ripe for road testing. Nice fuzzy line, and the possibility of puddles, what's not to like?

Getting simplified, and with a "better" aesthetic.

Juxtaposition

This isn't really about the xmas streetlights that come and go unnoticed at this time of year - though they do appear in both photos ... it's simply a juxtaposition of atmospheres ...

Near Old Street, next to the demolished arts venue The Foundry
(artistic splashes of paint!)

Stroud Green Road - before an onslaught of darkness, wind, and rain

Back to graphite

Water-soluble graphite ... an intriguing material. Adding water to the graphite line makes it very dark, and you can move the shading to elsewhere on the paper. I'm planning to use it for some "travel lines" and have been experimenting; will it make dark lines on a dark background?

A light and a heavier coating in my notebook, quite a grainy paper. Lines added with a finger dipped in water (top) and below, the waterbrush, which can carry the line outside the dark area (might be useful). The graphite areas are shiny; the wetted areas are matte. You have to move your head to see it properly.

Some other papers - all smooth except top right. Some started out black and the graphite made them silvery or grey, then again the addition of water for the matteness, darkness -

Taking the photo reminded me what a nightmare it is to photograph graphite - it's dark and shiny. Would scanning get results?

Further experiments - smooth paper with various ways of applying the graphite. And some erasure after the water dried -

Next step, road-testing the fully-graphite-covered sheets (A4) on my next journey on the Underground.

Poetry Thursday - Stump by Hugh Sykes Davies

In the stump of the old tree, where the heart has rotted out, there is a hole the length of a man’s arm, and a dank pool at the bottom of it where the rain gathers, and the old leaves turn into lacy skeletons. But do not put your hand down to see, because       in the stumps of old trees, where the hearts have rotted out, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and dank pools at the bottom where the rain gathers and old leaves turn to lace, and the beak of a dead bird gapes like a trap. But do not put your hand down to see, because       in the stumps of old trees with rotten hearts, where the rain gathers and the laced leaves and the dead bird like a trap, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and in every crevice of the rotten wood grow weasel’s eyes like molluscs, their lids open and shut with the tide. But do not put your hand down to see, because       in the stumps of old trees where the rain gathers and the trapped leaves and the beak and the laced weasel’s eyes, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and at the bottom a sodden bible written in the language of rooks. But do not put your hand down to see, because       in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotted out there are holes the length of a man’s arm where the weasels are trapped and the letters of the rook language are laced on the sodden leaves, and at the bottom there is a man’s arm. But do not put your hand down to see, because       in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotted out there are deep holes and dank pools where the rain gathers, and if you ever put your hand down to see, you can wipe it in the sharp grass till it bleeds, but you’ll never want to eat with it again. Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 7 (Nov. 1936), 129.

This poem - or rather, the first three verses - was read on "The Surreal Verb", an episode of BBC Radio 3's "cabaret of the word", which was broadcast in December and can be heard here. As one of the participants said later in the programme, it has a very different effect when you hear it than when you read it - as heard, it paints a vivid picture (read, it's merely word after word). There's a reading on youtube but I think it's rather spoiled by the music.

A potted biography of Hugh Sykes Davies (1909-1984) (from here): "He had done so many things and played so many parts that you never felt you had come to the end of him. Some knew Hugh Sykes Davies as a wit, some as a lover, some as a teacher; and there were those who read his novels and even his poems. He also married a good deal. He had many wives, four of them his own; taught at Cambridge for nearly half a century — a communist for half the time; was a surrealist in the Paris of the mid-1930s; and finally, as faith and dogma ran dry, a structural linguist. He was once to have been a candidate for the House of Commons too, in 1940, in an election canceled because of invasion fears ... near the end of his life he was persuaded by Canadian television to make a program; and he did it on the symbolic condition they supplied a bottle of brandy in a Cambridge UK pub during the interview. That put him in a high good humor. As he walked home late he came upon a lonely policeman standing outside King’s College and approached him unsteadily. ‘Have there been any interesting fires in the colleges this evening, constable?’" 

The stump in the image is in Ayrshire, but there's likely to be a similar one near you....

Old paper plus new paper

Now that the new paper was stitched on, it can be seen to curve -

I think this is mainly due to the wool (bottom two rows, and 2/3 of the way up) - perhaps because it's wool that's already been knitted, unravelled, reused, and thus is extra kinky (wool fibres are made up of little scales, which is why it felts) -

On the left, coarse wool; other types have smoother scales (via)

But let's not get diverted. On the other side, the stitching is plain, which is nice when there's text under it, but boring otherwise (as a sermon might be?) -

I still haven't found a "reason" to stitch into sermons - so far, this is driven by the effect of stitch on paper. But for it to make sense to me, the stitch has to link up with what is printed on the paper.

Meanwhile I'm excited to make some paper curls with curly stitches. Or tubes...

More stitching on old paper

Following on with the possible new project -

Variations of stitch and threads. Linen threads, cotton threads, silk threads ... and the stitching is whatever comes to mind - a sort of twining, double rows of running stitch, and best of all so far, putting twist into the thread and leaving the loops over the lettering, or on the plain paper.

I'm not happy with the combination of papers but that's not to say that a different combination might not work better.

Next step is to stitch into the plain paper on the left, restoring the shape of the page and seeing how those threads behave on a different support.

Hours of harmless fun lie ahead.

A new project, perhaps

"Show up on time, smile, and do the work" - those are Grayson Perry's "rules" for productivity. He's right....

1. Show up on time - be in the studio at a certain time every day, or spend a certain amount of time in the studio every day.

2. Smile - enjoy it!

3. Do the work - well, this is the sticking point ... for me anyway ... what is "the work"? I've been rather tormenting myself with this over the past few weeks or months, to a paralysing extent.

So for the first "studio date" - which I hope will become a daily occurrence, gallivanting notwithstanding, I got out an old bit of work - "The Journey to the Studio" - and spent an hour adding to it.

For the second, it was mending - black darns on a favourite black wool top. Subtly knobbly.

During the mending session I was listening to catchup radio - specifically, a programme on The Supernatural North on "The Sunday Feature". The presenter had been to northernmost Norway, and one of the  participants was Philip Pullman (author of Northern Lights etc), who mentioned:

"...the kind of excitement you get when you know there's a book there, but you don't know what the book is yet"

I paused in the mending and wrote it down...

... and that must have planted an idea in my subsconscious (was it the mention of "book"?) ...

Suddenly I wanted to experience that excitement; the way to approach (or perhaps generate) it arrived via a bout of creative insomnia.

So for the third "studio date", I started sewing paper - mixing the rag-paper pages from the 1738 Sermons book with tracing paper -

Each line has been rolled over by the pricking wheel, so it's easy to stitch and the stitching can look regularly spaced. The curly bits on the blank paper are the result of twisting the thread and letting it lie as it fell after each stitch (the back is smooth).

I don't like the look of this particular insert, and I don't know what this is going to be "about" - but simply stitching on the paper, and watching what happens, is producing one or two ideas that will lead to further sampling after this page is finished. The Sermons book has several hundred pages. There could be a book here ... or something like a book ...

More from 2009

The plan, going through old photos, was to purge at least one file of the unwanted images. The plan has not been carried out, but I'm delighted to rediscover some of the things that interested me five years ago.

Jagged lightning-design African baskets, and headrests, in a shop window

Photos through rainy windscreens - Abbas Kiarostami's "Rain" series

Building - un-building (a ship?) on the left

Smartening up the capital of Rwanda:  "Hiding the ugly facts" is the Guardian's headline -
"Behind the facades lie stories of forced displacement"
(a bit like London nowadays, "indigenous" people no longer able to afford to live in newly gentrified areas)

Exhibition by Charlotte Hodes at Marlborough Gallery

By Su Blackwell

Goodnight Moon...

Quick trip to the British Museum

On a rainy Saturday, what better than going to a museum? Certainly the BM was packed - there was a queue up the stairs at the front entrance, and a man with a megaphone just inside the doors telling people to keep moving straight ahead into the Great Court. Oh the slowness of the shuffling crowds - and that entrance area is so dimly lit....

Much brighter in the Great Court -

98 steps take you to the Upper Floors of the museum

My task, with a view to finding a gallery for Drawing Tuesday, was to see if the Korean Gallery has reopened - and it has - but it will have to wait for another day, in favour of the Japanese Gallery, which has many delightful objects, including this bowl of 1000  feather leaves -

It took Hosono Hitome over six months to make it.

(click to enlarge)

Body parts

Granaries in northern Spain

A post about granaries - horreos - of the Iberian peninsula somehow deleted itself from my blog ... but these useful traditional buildings continue to fascinate me, and not just the Spanish ones. Ways of keeping rodents out of the grain supplies are needed everywhere!

Here are a few pictures to show similarity and variety.

Galicia (thanks to Juan at City Lit for this photo)

Somerset Museum of Rural Life (via) - note the straddle stones

Espigueiros in Portugal (via)

Iran (via)

Galicia again - though this one stands in front of a restaurant rather than on a farm (via)

Ceramic granary, Han dynasty (via) - a mingqi object for the afterlife

Ancient grain storage in the middle east (via)

Inca granary (restored), Bolivia (via)

Ethiopia (via)

And then there are these, an early 20th century format of grain elevator seen beside railways all over the North American prairies, storing wheat prior it being transported to mills -

Tilotson, Manitoba (via)

Views of Kew

Best foot forward

Happy new year!