Poetry Thursday - The Finished House by George Mackay Brown

The Finished House

In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth. 
Then a table, between door and window 
Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house. 
A bed is laid in a secret corner 
For the three agonies – love, birth, death – 
That are made beautiful with ceremony. 
The neighbours come with gifts – 
A set of cups, a calendar, some chairs. 
A fiddle is hung at the wall. 
A girl puts lucky salt in a dish. 
The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter. 
On the seventh morning 
One spills water of blessing over the threshold. 

George Mackay Brown (via)

For the final term of the Extended Drawing course - which consists of a personal project - my theme is "home". I am collecting images, thoughts, poems... and this poem contains some deep-rooted images.

Mackay Brown was born in Orkney - here is an ancient Orkney home -

(via)

Perhaps the customs he mentions date back all those thousands of years?

Wordless Wednesday

Drawing Tuesday - British Museum

Some of us went to the "gloomy room" with the exhibition about the textile -

others to the relative brightness of the Japanese gallery -

Results -

Carol's wooden statue

Sue's metal helmet

Mags' terra cotta figurine

My dancing Krishna

Jo's man climbing into a 15th century pot

Najlaa's bronze rice container

Janet B's pottery vessel (an early apartment building??)

Janet B's hawk mask

It was also interesting to see Najlaas experimentation with tea as paint - somewhat random, somewhat manipulated -

 Following on from the discussion of Inktense pencils last week, Janet K brought along the chart she found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA7GURIPvJo and filled in with the colours she had on hand -

 Another tempting drawing tool, a nice tin of Cretacolour pastels -

Over the Edge

At this stage, it felt so very nearly done ... but there's a decision or two to be made, and a ways to go yet.

After a bit of humming and hawwing about just which type of baking parchment to use

National Collection of baking parchment, in various states of growth and blossom

and finishing the sample - ie, deciding whether or not to use stitches on the layers of parchment - I attached the sleeve to the layers of baking parchment, which had already been machined (invisibly) to make up the right width. Now, that free-falling bit "just" needs to be attached to the woven layer. Ah, but before that can happen, some stitches need adding to the parchment ... quite a few? just a few? The tone of the thread will match the parchment, so the stitches won't be obvious from a distance, but will show as great entangling loops up close.

Nearly ready to send off my entry. All the machine sewing is done, and the machine has been stored under the table. My computer moved into its new home -

Yesterday

Earlier today

I'm really happy to have some clear surfaces! And note the pristine design board ... might have to do something about that....

Now:  pots in progress
 (hand stitched and ready for dipping in porcelain slip)

Addendum

The finished piece, with subtle stitching in the middle - "On the Edge of Silence" -

Model hospital

"You're certainly not the first person to take a picture of that," said an employee standing near the Hammersmith's post room (north entrance). "It's been there a good long time." (Since the days of tea chests, that is; they used to be everywhere, and now are a rare sight.)

Cactuses at Kew Gardens

Choosing a book ... by its cover

These for dipping into, not for the delight of looking at the cover -

Claxton: field notes from a small planet, by Mark Cocker; The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st century bestiary, by Caspar Henderson; Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich

And this one for reading too, though it was the linocut cover (and endpapers) that drew my eye, to the point where I need to get a copy -

Here again it's the cover ... cut out of an endgrain woodblock, so the trees show a strange sort of woodiness -

How delightful to have a shelf full of "secret art" in the form of book covers. A democratic medium?

A different but equally fascinating (to me) topic - "lifting the lid on women's lives" (reviewed here) -

Apologies for the blurry photo - my hand was trembling with excitement...

Poetry Thursday - nine winners

The nine winners in the Poetry Society's 38th National Poetry Competition are published online at http://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/. Here is one of them, the one that took first prize -

(via)

Night Errand

Eric Berlin

O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle
of upstate New York, your colossal lot

of frost-heaved spaces so vacant I could cut
straight through while blinking and keep my eyes

shut, I’ve come like the flies that give up the ghost
at the papered fronts of your defunct stores,

through the food court where napkins, unused
to touch, are packed too tight to be dispensed,

past the pimpled kid manning the register
who stares at the buttons and wipes his palms.

If I press my eyes until checkers rise
from the dark – that’s how the overheads glower

in home essentials as I roam through Sears,
seeking assistance. I know you’re here.

For this window crank I brought, you show me
a muted wall of TVs where Jeff Goldblum

picks his way through the splintered remains
of a dinosaur crate. There must be fifty

of him, hunching over mud to inspect
the three-toed prints. I almost didn’t

come in here at all, driving the opposite
of victory laps, and waiting as I hoped

for the red to leave my eyes, but my urgency
smacked of your nothingness. I did it again –

I screamed at the woman I love, and in front
of our one-year-old, who covered his ears.

(From the website) Eric Berlin’s winning poem explores a fleeting private moment: with a sleep-deprived dad making a dash to the shops on a mundane errand, a flash of anger, and the shame that follows. The setting is a mall in upstate New York, but the emotions and the experience are universally human.

Judge Sarah Howe described ‘Night Errand’ as “one of those poems that wouldn’t let you move on, but demanded a pause to dwell and recoup, followed by the compulsion to read it again. Its initial grip gave way to a sort of haunting”. 

(Further news) Filmpoems of the winning poems have been commissioned in partnership with Alastair Cook and Filmpoem, and will be available to view on our website soon. The films will tour at festivals around the [UK] and beyond.

Puddling about

Some shots of houses across the street reflected in the giant puddle that forms at the corner during heavy rain.

Flipped, and with some cropping -

And more, taken while Storm Katie's winds were still blowing -

 Sometimes they lose something by being turned 180 degrees ...

Drawing Tuesday - Maritime Museum

A sunny day in Greenwich -

and a great display of figureheads at the Maritime Museum -

Information on the ships they came from

It felt like I'd bitten off more than I could chew ...

... but perseverance filled the page

More figureheads

Part of the figurehead of HMS Bristol, built 1861 and broken up in 1883.
The figurehead was one of many that decorated the roof of the office of
Castle & Co (the breakers)at Millbank, London; its head is all that
 survived WWII bombing

Other work -

Carol continues to use colour

Sue's speedboat - Miss Britain III - rivets and reflections

Mags looked again and again at the "roping palm" - she writes about it here

Sitting at mezzanine level, Janet K focussed on two of the figureheads

Janet B took both the front and back views of a statue of a ssiilor

Both Mags and Janet B had been on a drawing course at the
British Museum and told us about what they'd done and learned 

Tool of the week - a tin of Lumograph pencils, HB to 8B