Art I like - Louise Baldwin

Some of Louise's work at the 2009 Knitting and Stitching show.
One of my earliest textiles courses was with Louise, and I continue to find her work a delight.

Waxing

This "sky birds" piece has two starting points:

-the crumpled brown paper that was in the large-paper drawer - it got me crumpling a smaller piece of rough but thin grey paper - it developed small holes

-the waxing of the brown tissue paper yesterday for the "sea whispers" book

A lot of wax was ironed out of yesterday's book, and the newsprint used to absorb it was still in the bin - so I got it out to see if the waste wax would transfer to this paper. (But first I blobbed it a bit with ink.)

Not much wax transferred back, but there was a candle lying to hand, so I drew on the paper with the candle and then ironed the wax in - distinct marks! tooo distinct, they need obliterating -- more candle, more ironing. When the paper was hot, the candle melted then & there - and by using the length, rather than the end, of the candle, you can get speedy coverage. Best of all -- there's no excess wax to iron out. I shall be using the candle technique again.

Excavating

Searching for a piece of paper large enough and heavy enough to use for a case for yesterday's "Sea Whispers" book, I found I had to clear out the large-paper drawer. It deflected me from my purpose, but did lead to a bit of throwing out of old work and the discovery of some pieces I'm keeping "for now..." - or, for making into books.

For the record, the pieces above are from a botanical illustration course, a "go wild with watercolour" course, a linocut course, a colour course - at Ormond Road Workshops, City Lit, and Mary Ward Centre. The strange (but large!) person was painted in a workshop at the National Portrait Gallery, and the translucent triangles were done at home. All these have been languishing unremembered for about ten years.

It's good to sort through drawers - even if you don't throw anything out, you do find things you'd forgotten about (so much lovely new paper!). But be careful - you might find yet more projects to add to an already-long list...

This week at college

Not much going on ... no seminar on Tuesday; the screenprint workshop was unexpectedly shut on Wednesday, and I was coughing too much to go anywhere on Thursday.

In the Wednesday afternoon slot, Graham Rawle (of "Lost Consonants" fame) gave a most interesting lecture about his work. The current project is a book about a man who finds playing cards, and starts to make connections between them, feeling they are telling him he has a mission to save Princess Diana. Graham gave us some combinations of cards, so we could make our own connections -

(Sorry about the blurry picture.) He ended with this thought: If you don't want to get out of bed in the morning and start work immediately, you might be doing the wrong project.

In the get-together on Wednesday before the lecture, I brought out my screenprint project

and got some interesting feed back, which has me thinking about moving on from presenting it as "a book" into a more sculptural forms, via cutting slits (yikes! cutting!) in the larger pieces to "weave in" the smaller ones, using them as double-sided joins to make a circular piece; or a concertina trail along the floor; or rolled

or folded pieces added to flat backings

or even cut up into tiles - that will get me looking at tiles in the Underground ...

Arrival of the train

Tiny pix assembled via screengrab from the downloaded picture files - quicker than going via Bridge and Photoshop to make a proper contact sheet. They may be a bit bigger if you click on them to open in a new window. But the point of the sequence is the flow and flux and shifting of position.

At the moment I'm impatient with processing photos -- sometimes you feel you'll never catch up... (maybe the answer is to stop taking so many!)

Skybirds project

An accumulation of relevant images -

This one is by Rowena Hughes and opens new trains of thought -

She has also printed birds on a found dictionary page, and fastened it to the glass with magnets - clever and elegant -

I remember Eberhard Ross's "Swarm" from his show last year -

The words of the poem are written in stone in Slough -

Maps as books

"Everyday Road Signs" by Carol Barton -

I'm also enjoying her blog.

From the book fair

Some new books came home with me -

Printing on acetate by Rosie Dodds - beautiful -
A video by Pat Hodson and collaborators -
It was lovely to hold the book while watching the video -
Roxann Maguire chose bridges as her subject because her father was involved with building them -
The title of Simon Goode's book, "The sun did shine here", came from an old postcard, and the blue skies came from similar postcards -
Pylons, by Kali Taylor-Mittmann -
For this lovely little book with its cut-outs and folding door, there is no author/maker -
Some work by my colleagues: Renee Fisher, Natalie Yiaxi, Renee again, Ya-Yuan Yang, Mi-Young Pang.

But this book went home with someone else -

The one about the Piccadilly Line, prepared for the text-encounter-time project the month before; that morning in my room I gave it a new cover, including an explanation of the 18 November 1987 and 7 July 2005 dates, and wrote the dates on the foredge (one of the criticisms was that the whiteness was out of place, so I put it into place by giving it a purpose).

I'm thrilled that someone liked it enough to buy it. It sold while I was away from the stand...

Postal surprise

Lovely and useful things ("legendary notebooks" no less!) - thank you Erika!

Outsiders

The sadness of a funfair by daylight.

Book du jour - sea whispers

the tide, the beach

the stones pulled in and out

the sound of the stones in the water

you dream of the waves, of the sound of stones

you dream of a huge book, of the movement and sound of turning pages

you roll from side to side, hearing the sound of stones

you becomes the stones, the book

"Seawhispers" is a response to my dream, to finding myself rolling from side to side as I turned the pages of the huge book in the dream - waking to find myself entangled in the bedclothes.

I wanted something swishy - large swishy sheets of paper - and there on the studio floor were some sheets of brown tissue paper, intended for screenprinting.

I used a line of ink for the horizon - never mind that it spread very quickly, and looked more like trees on a riverside than the sea meeting the sky. After sprinkling some more ink on the "land" and throwing salt water at the "sky" (to leave faint white marks) it seemed that the white marks would be too faint, so I mixed up a little white gouache and threw that at the sky.

Out came the wax pot and the sheets got coated. Here's one laid out on newsprint - layers & layers of newsprint - for the wax removal (bonus result: a lot of nice waxed paper to use elsehow) -
The effect is best against the light -
I'd added more ink, diluted to varying degrees, to come to rest in the areas that missed waxing, but on noticing that one section had torn and was on the point of disintegrating completely, my plan for big floppy pages had to change -
By folding them and using the wax to "glue" the pages together, a book eventually appeared. It was quite tricky to line up the spines, keep some pages separate and others together. And getting the tissue (an unwaxed afterthought) cover to stick to the pages still hasn't been entirely resolved (click on picture to see it larger) -
One of my favourite pages -
Perhaps just the faint white salt-rings would have been enough -- I didn't know then that unwaxed areas would become "clouds" too.

It needs a case - a project for tomorrow perhaps.

Colourful conjunctions

Around the house - you see things differently when you wander around with a hungry camera.

Kingsway tunnel

It's real name is the Strand underpass, and it was built in 1961 within part of the former tramway subway. Sunday found bit of a traffic jam in the tunnel - lots of brake lights reflected on walls as cars started and stopped - it was a relief to get out into the air again.

The old tram tunnel is much more interesting - not too long ago it was open for the "Chord" exhibition.

Red and white

Freshly-painted buffers around the construction sites near Tate Modern. The rain caused the paint to run a little, and someone added an empty can to make a bit of street art.

(And my 2,000th blog post! I'll be having something red to celebrate, but it will come from a green bottle, not a soft drink can.)

Knit your own...

...royal wedding! (Brilliant...) I heard about it here, and hasten to share this discovery with... the world...

"Home from Home"

In conjunction with the book fair, the pv for an exhibition - a houseful of artists' books! First you went to the kitchen and helped yourself to wine, then wandered from room to room looking at the work.

The entire houseful was great - see and read about it here and this site has links to the artists, but not necessarily the work they had there.

Walking around with a plastic beaker of wine makes it hard to take notes, so I confess to not being to attribute most of these works. The baroque birdcage -

transformed travel timetables -
books and neon! -
monoprinting -
The very versimilitude of a dresser, up-cycled by Jane Platts -
yummy bottles by Gillian Holt -
My favourite - the book covered in graphite (imagine doing that with a quilt ... in a quilt show ... Do Not Touch!) -
Back at my own "home from home" (the hotel), a room within the room -

Victorian splendour

The caf in the City Art Gallery, Leeds - recently restored; what a splendid ceiling -

Older art quilts

Among the first art quilt exhibitions was Quilt National in 1979, set up rather as the Impressionists set up their "salon des refuses" a century before - to give this new genre/style of work a showplace. That show included some iconic pieces - and some forgotten artists. I was interested to find the work of Jean Hewes -

this is Dancers, from the Corea Artquilt Community website. In a review of a 2011 revisiting of the 1986 The Art Quilt show, we learn a little about Hewes (Dancers and also her Angel were in that show):

"Trained as a ceramicist, Hewes put away the messy clay when she had children, shifting to painting in watercolor. Then she began making quilts from scraps, eventually bringing the layering, transparency and soft focus of watercolor into her enigmatic, image-filled quilts."

Interestingly, nearly all those in that 1986 exhibition had formal art and/or design training. Michael James said: "Most went to art school or studied some medium, not necessarily textiles, and had deliberately set out to develop a body of work using the medium of the quilt. That was probably what distinguished that group of people from other group exhibitions of whatever you want to call it -- I hate the word 'art quilt,' so I stumble over it."

Some of the names listed in the 1979 QN show aren't easily accessible by internet.

In reading a review of a 1983 art quilt show, this description made me wish there was a photo of the quilt somewhere-

" The sewing together of squares, the most basic form of quilt making, is used with ingenuity in Sandra Humberson's pieced and embroidered ''Star Map.'' Each tiny hand-silk- screened squares is a microcosmic echo of the whole quilt, which in turn is a microcosm of an imagined map of the heavens. "

A starting-point for an intergalactic quilt "journey" - ?