Art heros - Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin says of his work: "I am a representational painter but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations."

There's an article about him in today's Guardian. Read it here. Recovering from illness, he has done two 20-foot paintings. See more of his work here.

Hodgkin has the reputation of being a difficult interviewee. He says he can't, out of respect for his own work, talk about it. When asked what a painting is about, he might reply: “Look! Just look!”

He also said, "I don't think English people like painting much. It's all right if you're an amateur, but the profession of painting makes people very uneasy." (Could that be because "the profession of painting" is a hard thing to understand?)

After seeing the Hodgkin show at the Tate in 2006 - pictures with lots of space around them, on brightly-painted walls of various colours - I started this piece based on this one (using colours I had to hand) -It was emotional to see those paintings; this is my response to that situation.

Ceramics 2

The "clay notebooks" we marked and painted with slip last week were fired during the week. I used white, red, and black slip. This morning's task was to add underglaze colours, and glazes, on the one that would be fired at earthenware temperature, and oxides and glazes on the one that would be fired at stoneware temperature. The range of colours, rather earthy - impossible to try them all. I used just grey. In the background, some luscious bright colours - off limits! - to tempt us to carry on with ceramics next term (we have to choose just two options).

The stoneware plaque on the left has some unglazed areas - I kinda ran out of time and had to slop it on - well it's all an experiment! The white crust hides nickel oxide, iron oxide, and ilmenite (coarse). The earthenware plaque on the right has some wax crayon to act as resist - the colour will burn away. And a shiny clear glaze will appear...

In the afternoon, mass and volume - starting by shaping a block of clay into a sphere. Or, as many approximations of a sphere as there were blocks of clay -

Following a sequence of directions, we added lines, then gouged out areas - can't remember if there was an instruction to add marks, but they seemed essential -Next week we'll be cutting this up into five pieces (why five?) and making something new with those, and taking out more volumes...

Colour 2

More colour exercises, using colours found in magazines, or - easier, quicker - paint samples. Chroma - the intensity of a colour - the orange can be "diluted" towards yellows and towards reds, and by being darker or lighter. The blue can go towards green or toward purple, and again, darker or lighter. So there's a lot going on, and it's hard to evaluate the actual amount of "chroma" -

Next, trying to make the same colour look like different colours - lighter, darker, warmer, cooler - by putting it on different backgrounds. Some of these look more obvious in the photo than they do in reality. Though I think I understand the principle (it looks darker on a lighter background, warmer on a cooler background, etc), I can't really "see" it. Maybe this takes practice.

Finally, making two colours look the same. Do they?

Most people had done lots of homework, filling the pages of their colour sketchbook. Here's some Ann prepared earlier - "some colours just sing," she said.

Shop till you drop

A new series of Little Gem Quilts, using plastic bags. In the first one, I covered the bits of plastic with net and stitched around them. Didn't want to pin into the plastic and leave holes, so the net was useful for helping hold everything in place. At first I merely stitched the handles (see middle of top row) but it looked a bit bare - the 3D handles make a big difference. And yes, that's a John Lewis bag round the edge. 

After that I got bolder and stitched through the plastic. The background was quilted afterwards (in wavy lines). Another possibility is to  quilt the backing-wadding-top sandwich first, then add the bags, and also applique the handles.

Textiles 1

Objective: to produce a collecton of drawings and collages of surface textures and forms. Working in monochrome, we used quink, brusho, waterproof ink, graphite powder, wax resist, charcoal, chalk, bleach, etc - to make as many different types of mark as possible. Then tried to create four interesting overall textures combining media, changing scale, density, quality, direction; using positive and negative marks, combining and layering media and effects.In the afternoon, we chose an object (in this case a string of dried aubergines that looked like little bells), described it in words - aiming also to understand the relationship between the structure and the texture, and the elements of repetition in the object. Then to interpret the object through making marks using a combination of media.

I felt there was too much going on at once and I lost track of what I'd intended to do. And which brush had which sort of ink on it, that sort of thing -- it all got uncomfortably chaotic for me!

The surprise of the day was these colours that Nod produced with quink over gluestick. Bleach made pink and yellow, and brusho over white pastel made a blue, but these colours were something else altogether -

A nice surprise

My "Thin Blue Line" quilt - currently touring to the Loch Lomond quilt show in Scotland, and then to Minerva Art Centre in Wales - is also in the German magazine Patchwork as part of a six page article on CQ's Thin Blue Line challenge! Left to right, Margaret Ramsay's "Gythion Glow", my "With Every Heartbeat", Jill Exell's "Land of Two Halves", and Kate Dowty's "Cracking Up". TBL is in good company -

A few more Little Gems

"In and Out" - circles cut out of bondawebbed fabric, using the "negative spaces" as well - and a couple of appliqued circles that may yet get a bit of embellishment before reaching the Little Gems website .... "Dark Star" includes a chunk of a Christmas ornament -

"Making Waves" started as a warm-up piece for machine quilting (silk dupion from a thrift-shop find) -

Ceramics 1

A new playground! Today, the first of our three taster sessions in pottery/ceramics. After a slide show that included some fabulous images of mud brick mosques and granaries, as well as Cretan, Chinese and other treasures, the morning's task was some 10-minute drawings of the still life - with dots and dashes; tone; letters/symbols; and cross-hatching.

All with a dark brown conte-type crayon -

After lunch, introduction to types of clay - white, buff (St Thomas), crank, and terracotta -

and here's the "clay notebook" - making marks on slabs of clay. These were deep jabs that partly closed up when the clay was slammed down on the bench -What you can get with slips and glazes, fired at different temperatures - the terracotta on the right is fired at earthenware (1080 degrees) and when pinged, sounds dull - it's porous. The white clay on the left is fired at 1280 degrees, stoneware temperature, and sounds "bright" when pinged.

My "don't know what I'm doing" slab has terracotta inlaid, and has black slip painted on and red and white slip blobbed and spattered. It's an experiment! (to be continued after firing, adding glazes...) -

It's a dauntingly long way from this beautiful porcelain vessel (by Prue Seward; 3" high).

The vexed question of the essay topic

For "the essay" - or should that be The Essay - this term, the brief is to compare and contrast works by a modernist artist and a postmodernist artist - oh and to put the artists in context of their "ism". I'm having a hard time chosing my artists. So many possibilities; so many I'd like to know more about...

Friday after class I spent a few happy hours in the Westminister Art Library checking out some leads -
- Elizabeth Frink (love her drawings, especially the one for "Harbinger Bird" seen at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne recently, and I'm very fond of her horse-and-rider statue on Piccadilly);

- Louise Nevelson (she of the wood assemblages) "the most celebrated sculptor of American modernism";
- Tacita Dean (ah those chalk drawings on blackboard!);

- Rosa Bonheur (in 1853 her 16-foot Horse Fair sealed her reputation)
and finding some interesting "stuff" along the way - Dean Hughes' paintings/drawings inside brown paper bags, for instance.

Also I'm considering pairing Tracey Emin (of the tent and the unmade bed) with Meret Openheim (of the fur-lined teacup).
I've tried to fit John Virtue's landscape painting into the postmodernist box, so as to pair his huge London monochrome riverscapes with Monet's views of London's river (or perhaps Whistler's paintings) -- but into that box Virtue would not go; although he's working after the 1970 watershed, he fits none of the postmodern criteria - does not collage or use words, doesn't depict consumer or popular culture, there's no performance art or appropriation, and the wrong kind of simplification. OK, think again ...

Any suggestions?

But is it art?

The art class had a day out - in the morning at the Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, then the afternoon looking around the East End galleries (most seemed to be between shows) and making our way to the Whitechapel Gallery for the tail end of the afternoon.

But the galleries weren't the only place you could have thought-provoking visual experiences. OK these might be random occurrences - or they might be deliberate interventions (by people with art-school credentials...) - you be the judge ...

Everyday life, Brick Lane E1

"Vine" Little Gem

I'm really enjoying using tinfoil for Little Gems. This old bit of handmade felt will make some leaves - Here they are on top of the quilt sandwich (backing, wadding, tinfoil), under a bit of a repurposed nylon scarf. I've sewn round the edges of the leaves, and they make a satisfying bulge. The long threads are dealt with after all the leaves are sewn down, rather than dealing with the thread after each separate leaf is done.

I sewed the stem with the presser foot, rather than the free-motion foot, but you can see where the pressure of the foot made "tracks" in the tinfoil. Lesson: use the freemotion foot throughout.

What to do in the background? How about some "shadow vines" - here some cords are used to determine the layout, and some of the leaf templates put in place to get an idea of what it will look like - I used a blunt needle to lightly indicate the vine and leaf outlines, and just stitched until the line needed to stop - in which case it was sometimes possible to carefully go along some previous stitching, rather than have to stop and cut the thread -

Next, take the thread out of the needle and stitch all over the background, between the shadow leaves and vines - this will puncture the tinfoil, but as it's behind the sheer layer, it'll all stay in place.

With all the stitching done, it was time to trim to size and apply the binding. I stitched round an A4 piece of paper, then again just inside that line, using pale thread for invisibility, and trimmed along the outer line of stitching. (The stitching helps keep the foil from ripping, if you use a rotary cutter.)

For the binding I used 1.5" slices of net, folded, sewn first to the back of the quilt, right near the quilt edge. Note that the folded edge of the binding is to the outside of the quilt - On the front, fold the binding over as far as it will go, and stitch close to the folded edge of the net.

Do the sides first, then the top and bottom. Et voila! -