Poetry Thursday - A Dreaming Week by Carol Ann Duffy

"the ink of space" - Night Sky #4, by Vija Celmins (image from here)

A Dreaming Week

Not tonight, I’m dreaming
in the heart of the honeyed dark
in a boat of a bed in the attic room
in a house on the edge of the park
where the wind in the big old trees
creaks like an ark.

Not tomorrow, I’m dreaming
till dusk turns into dawn – dust, must
most, moot, moon, mown, down –
with my hand on an open unread book,
a bird that’s never flown…distantly
the birdsong of the telephone

Not the following evening, I’m dreaming
in the monocle of the moon,
a sleeping S on the page of a bed
in the tome of a dim room, the rain
on the roof, rhyming there
like the typed words of a poem.

Not the night after that, I’m dreaming
till the stars are blue in the face
printing the news of their old light
with the ink of space,
yards and years of black silk night
to cover my sleeping face.

Not the next evening, I’m dreaming
in the crook of midnight’s arm
like a lover held by another
safe from harm, like a child
stilled by a mother, soft and warm,
twelve golden faraway bells for a charm.

Not that night either, I’m dreaming
till the tides have come and gone
sighing all over the frowning sand,
the whale’s lonely song
scored on wave after wave of water
all the wet night long.

Not the last evening, I’m dreaming
under the stuttering clock,
under the covers, under closed eyes,
all colours fading to black,
the last of daylight hurrying
for a date with the glamorous dark.

–Carol Ann Duffy (from her 2002 volume, Feminine Gospels) - found on the slowmuse blog

Camera settings

The variation in results of photography in the previous post led to some experimentation. The black quilt wadding arrived yesterday evening (Royal Mail delivery people work late!) and was lying on the sofa, relaxing, so I added the black blocks and took a series of photos.

Black is difficult to photograph, and the grey day was still dawning when the pix were taken, so lights were on in the room - four lights, none of them particularly bright. The only adjustment in Photoshop is some cropping (to remove the sofa and rug!).

"Sunny" camera setting

"Light bulb" setting (incandescent light)

Flash - close to (1.5m)

Flash, further away, with zoom (3m)

The camera setting - which takes only 2 seconds to change - makes a great difference to the colour balance, and saves a lot of work in Photoshop, if it's possible at all.

I thought the distance of the flash might make a difference - any difference though, is in the effects of the zoom - it seems to lift the top of the photo towards the camera. Perhaps I wasn't far enough away - the flash has a limited range, as the light disperses over a wider area the further away from the subject you are.

Close up, no flash [uncropped]

As I write, daylight seems to have arrived fully - but it's a grey day and the light isn't good for photography, much too dim. Even so, I turned off all the lights in the room and did another sequence of shots under natural light. Digital cameras work "well" at low light conditions, we are told, so no need for flash...

"Lightbulb" camera setting

"Sunshine" camera setting

"Cloudy" camera setting

"Shade" camera setting

As the camera setting makes so much difference to the outcome, it's worth taking photos at different settings in dubious lighting conditions, especially if your subject is lying there peacefully!

What I didn't notice at the time is that there is an AWB setting on my camera - Auto White Balance - some other time, I'll test that...

Consider the Olive - fabric selection

Olives come, depending on ripeness, in shades of "their" green, brown, black - the brown even tending to pink, depending on variety. And there are backgrounds and other elements to consider. It's all rather chaotic at the moment...

The hand-dyed fabric at centre top is perfect olive colours - I used it for With Every Heartbeat a few years back, in the CQ "Thin Blue Line" show. Often it's the dull, assuming fabrics that turn out to be most useful.

So many fabrics come with their memories! On the left is the "gingko" fabric, a raffle prize, that led to the Gingko Gold quilt that sold in London Quilters' show in 2008, and on the right some discharge dye made at Bob Adams' workshop at Festival of Quilts in 2007 (he made a video about the discharge process there).

Now, the development of the Olive Idea ... I've had some mad thoughts about what olives might get up to in the world if they were creatures rather than vegetation ... or if they were points on a map ... or if they were states of mind ... which is all mad fun but perhaps better realised in a medium other than fabric ...

So, some drawing. That roundish shape has its attractions, and it has its limitations. But in the doing is the thinking, so the more drawing the better -

The colours of the photos come from playing around in Photoshop - adjusting the Levels of red, green, and blue in a photo taken under incandescent light (rather than daylight), which came out yellow-looking. (I should have changed the setting on the camera - or waited till later in the day.)

Surface printing on ceramics

It's great to be back in the ceramics room at City Lit - and 8 weeks of the course remain, Monday evenings; the tutor is Robert Cooper. The course description states: "Working with silkscreen, paper stencil, block and potato printing on unfired clay, biscuit and glazed surfaces, you will create pattern and narrative images with slips, oxides, glaze and on-glaze enamels on simple mould forms and tiles."

Lots of possibilities! My first thought was to develop the "tiles" I made for the "journey" piece on the foundation course; my second thought was to experiment and see where that might lead.  Looking back at the ceramics I made during the foundation course, there's some unfinished business ... those corners ....

In class we did some sponge printing with slip on slabs of clay - pure pleasure -

I may have ruined it by pressing in circles - they would have been better as almost-circles rather than perfectly round ones. Never mind, we'll see what happens when it's fired and given a glaze. It's in the mould to give it a bit of shape -

The simple triangle is a fascinating shape once you start making patterns with it. Serendipity sent this pattern along just as I was about to write this post -

Laotian pattern (image from here)

Next, slip trailing. Robert's demo included moving the pattern around by tilting the board -

 My own attempt at tilting didn't work because the slip was too thick, so I went for a profusion of embellishment -

 Once it's dried a bit, the edges will be cut off and ... what?

Flying cherubs

Found, by chance, on the V&A's "Search the Collections" page - what a treasure trove! "Search 1,112,026 objects and 294,714 images from the V&A's collections"

"The Virgin and Child with Angels" was made in 1500-1520, in Styria, Austria, probably as part of an altarpiece; it measures 83 x 92 cm and can be seen in Room 27 of the museum.

This group of carved [limewood] figures was probably once part of an altarpiece that stood on or behind the altar in a Christian church. The flowing drapery and the dynamic poses of the two small angels and the infant Jesus, who is holding a pomegranate [symbol of the resurrection], all contribute to its vitality.

The group was probably made in the area around the River Danube. The scheme of the drapery, the facial type of the Virgin Mary, and the dynamic composition, seem to be derived from an altarpiece in Mauer near Melk, dated 1509. This suggests that it was probably made by a sculptor in the circle of the Master of Mauer, an anonymous sculptor active in Upper and Lower Austria around the period 1500-1520.

The museum's site gives much more information on the background of the object here - physical description, object history, historical context - as well as related objects to explore. 

Journals, sketchbooks ...

The Black Book, constant companion, ready for ... whatever 

Seeing and reading about other people's marvellous sketchbooks and daily journalling (for instance here) makes me feel envious - and guilty (or something...) for not doing so myself.

First of all, is that strange emotion really guilt? Is there a "must" or even "you SHOULD do this" about it?

--long pause for thought--

No, there's no SHOULD. "Could", yes; and you or I "want" to, because it obviously works well as a method of generating ideas and recording thoughts, inspirations, whatever... And it's a lovely thing, to have all that in a book, to refer back to.

So, is it all about envy? Perhaps. That they CAN. That I fear this "easy beauty" is beyond me.

Or is it laziness, or disorganisation? To do this often; to make time; to give up something else so that there is time ...

--another long pause --

Basically, it's not my priority. Instead of a Daily Practice, I function via a combination of Going With The Flow, and Working To A Deadline. That keeps things ticking over nicely.

The pen marks the spot

And I always carry my black notebook/sketchbook, and camera. The notebook is for drawing in, writing in (preferably when indulging alone in a coffee shop), and sometimes as a means of using "wasted" time (on the train). The camera is for capturing the moment, and I use it as another kind of notebook.

Cogitations in a coffee shop, and some doodling, er, pattern-making

There's something else I do so habitually that I've ceased to notice, and that thing is - spending hours on the computer, writing for this blog. It's a way of organising what's going on, what's already happened, what might or might not happen next  - a journal, in effect. The blog functions as a (selective) diary, an aide-memoire for myself, a link to the outside world, and as a research tool. It's a place where I can document what I experience as an artist ... and as a curious person.

Just as anyone might want to make a "pretty" sketchbook rather than a big mess, I take care on the blog to fix up photos when possible, write grammatically, credit the "borrowed" photos via links that might drive traffic to other sites of interest -- and, mostly, to be brief. And have lots of pictures. And to avoid "i-words" - including the first person pronoun (mostly). You can't please all of the people all of the time, but with a little luck, it's interesting to some of the people some of the time.

The upshot of this bit of mulling is a resolution to give up the "guilt" about not having a beautiful sketchbook, and, for the moment at least (everything changes, yes??)  considering the blog to be one of my art activities - one way of "being in the world". (That will allay the "guilt" of spending too much time on the computer, rather than in the studio!)

It's definitely life-enhancing to see and read what the bloggers who I regularly visit are sharing ... especially their sketchbooks. I'm delighted to be able to be part of that - the blogosphere, this international community, is (imho) one of the best things to come out of the digital revolution.

More pattern-making, some using the non-dominant hand

And speaking of digital revolution... if only I could get feeling comfortable with my [brandname omitted] tablet device... A topic for another time (or maybe not!).

At Ally Pally - not Knitting & Stitching

The big hall at Alexandra Palace looks rather different when the Model Engineering Show is on - where are the closely-packed booths of traders that we're used to seeing at the Knitting & Stitching show?

These traders are selling  milling machines, rods and bars of metal, precision instruments, grinding gear and springs and all that ...

Mostly, though, the displays are by clubs and societies strutting their stuff. Some models are made from kits (don't knock it, kits take skill too), and some of the models are made from scratch - and they are truly amazing, taking years to make. Here's a couple under construction - that wonderful metal will eventually be hidden under careful layers of paint -

 

There was plenty of steaming action, also at 00 scale (which is tiny!) - water being added with an eyedropper -

 Other model set-ups, raptly admired, included one that has everything made of lego, and a tube station with three (historical) kinds of trains -

We were glad to see that there are still Meccano enthusiasts -

and that Meccano is being put to uses like these specs with windshield-wipers -

There's human interest a-plenty, not only in the participants and visitors, but in the tiny figurines added to the models -

Personnel on a 1:72 model of HMS Warspite

A life on the ocean waves for a girl and her dog

Many if not most of the people attending were men past retirement age - which of course is when you have the time to spend on your passions - and many were families, with enthusiastic children. Start young enough, and when you grow up you can work a digger -

 or develop a business taking a racing-car set-up round to social events -

 Finally, some amazing machines - they (and the skill-sets their use requires) seriously knock the socks off long-arm quilters, and the various saws and drills that the Resident Carpenter brings home -

 It would definitely be a luxury to have one of the machines that drill holes in anything -

First you need a shed.

London Art Fair

Some things that appealed to me, in no particular order (and not to scale) -

Robert Sargent Austin (1895-1973),  Deer (1929)

Pisarro, Buttercups, Colchester 1911

Yuji Oki,  Lost in Blue

Winifred Nicholson (this one is lovely too)

Tessa Traeger, part of Chemistry of Light; see more here or at Purdy Hicks till 21 Feb

Terri Brooks, Variation Stripes, 91x76cm (image from her blog) 

Letters on a whitened book page, by Vito Drago

Rebecca Salter, 160x180cm

David Pearce, The House Beside the Lake [precarious!]

Ffiona Lewis (oil painted with palette knife) and Annabel Gault (ink and wax)

Juan Carlos Stekelman, Excited Woman (1969)

Pinhole camera captures horses on Port Meadow - Horse Latitudes by Antonia Bruce

Sublime mixed-media pieces by Hilary Ellis

Kevin Sinnott, Bit of a Wind Got Up, 2008

Sarah Ball