Extended drawing (is it for the birds?)

Later today, before class, I am to have a tutorial and, given the distinct lack of work done outside class, and the still-woolly nature of my topic, I'm dreading it.  However - perhaps these are the very circumstances in which a tutorial can be most helpful! 

Let's start with last week's class. I'd photographed the bird houses and put them outside the gate for people to take -

then drew them (big) with conte and charcoal -

and captured some very crazy - whimsical, even - thoughts about birds bedded down in feather duvets in the privacy of the birdhouse, rather than exposed in nests -

One of the sheets of paper had a tear, which made a door in the book/house structure - I saved that "for later" and started with the smaller pieces -

This fold-awayable, open-upable, inside/outside book structure is my go-to option at the moment. Why fight it? Much can be done with a sheet of paper and a few folds!

Nests inside (with a very dark area at the centre ... rather like the dark hole where the birds enter, or disappear) ...  On the outside, using an eraser to take away the charcoal. Not really "nests", more like strange spidery things...

Underneath is a pattern of negative spaces from rubbing away the excess charcoal before using the rubber to draw with -

Once I noticed what was happening, I was a bit more careful about where the paper got put for the next bit of wiping-off. I like the way it almost looks like a pile of papers, and their shadows.

But how does it work in combination with the book/house structures ...

Research, still. Pootling about. Not getting anywhere much, just at the moment. 

Too much thinking, not enough doing...

But nice to get feedback from last time, attached to the sheet of "aims and objectives" we fill out at the beginning of each session -

More to think about.

Meanwhile, one of the birdhouses didn't get taken to a new home, so I'm keeping it, for now anyway -

Seeing it in the photo makes me wonder where else it might comfortably sit ...

Upheaval, continuing

Not all that long ago I showed some photos of my flat amid the chaos of renovation. Much has progressed in the two and a half weeks since the room was stripped. Now it's been insulated, rewired, replastered, and a skylight added -

This stage was preceded, of course, by this sort of thing -

Elsewhere in the flat, the chaos remains, with all the contents of that room, and others, needing "rationalisation" - basically, paring down to 10% (at a guess) of what has been and is hidden in cupboards and odd corners. The aim is to put back into the room ONLY what should BE in the room. So, I've lost my convenient hiding places for the books I might never get around to reading and the swathes of fabric I might never get around to sewing. 

Good, they need to go on to other places, new lives. But the hardening of heart needed to let them go is a wretched process. 

At the moment I'm concentrating on the books. This lot, some 3 dozen volumes, went to the Oxfam Bookshop early in the week -

As it was a sunny day, I put another dozen books "on the wall" and they disappeared in no time.

Which left the rest of the books that had been gathering dust under the desk, on Tom's carefully custom-fitted shelves - a practice piece, it turned out, for the bespoke shelving and cupboard-building that makes up a large part of his "carpentry" livelihood. 

On the left, the keepers; on the right, 44 books looking for new homes

The pile isn't down to 10% and there may have to be some new bookshelves somewhere, but 50% is pretty good.  I'd actually enjoy this if there was an obvious difference, such as a rewarding expanse of empty shelves.

And the sorting is the easy part - without a car to carry many bags at a time, getting the books (etc) to the charity shop takes time. So much easier to put them on the wall on a sunny day, and enjoy seeing them disappear.

This is from one of the older books (1929) that went out -

Saturday in the park

It's been a long time since I've walked across the park "early" on a Saturday morning. The cafe is full of young families, and there's lots of football instruction going on -

And in the quieter areas, some protected trees get on with what trees do -

Hawthorn

Oak

In the wild areas, cow parsley in bloom under the trees - no time to stop for a photo though.

Home thoughts from a birdhouse

Birds sometimes have houses ... do they have feather duvets in their bedrooms?

Feather duvets, backlit

Unnaturally feathery

Poetry Thursday - New Gravity by Robin Robertson

"pieces of the tree's jigsaw" (via)

New Gravity by Robin Robertson

---

Treading through the half-light of ivy

and headstone, I see you in the distance

as I'm telling our daughter

about this place, this whole business:

a sister about to be born,

how a life's new gravity suspends in water.

Under the oak, the fallen leaves

are pieces of the tree's jigsaw;

by your father's grave you are pressing acorns

into the shadows to seed.

From A Painted Field (2004),Picador £6.99 (via)

Robin Robertson (b. 1955) is a poet of austere and meticulous diction, tempered by a sensuous music [says www.poetryarchive.org]. He was born in Scone, Perthshire, and brought up on the north-east coast of Scotland but has spent much of his professional life in London where he is currently Poetry Editor at Jonathan Cape. Robertson came late to publishing in terms of his own work, his debut collection A Painted Field appearing in 1997. However, the assuredness of his poetry made an immediate impression [the book won several awards].

Wordless Wednesday

Drawing Tuesday - Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons

Lots of "specimens in glass" jars to draw ... and other objects too. The Hunterian museum is a selection of teaching specimens, some of them venerably old.

Sitting in front of some shelves labelled "products of plant generation" [or words to that effect - should have written it down], I started with a square jar from the bottom shelf -

(tools: permanent pen, somewhat soluble pen, water brush) then added the little jar from the shelf above, and after that chose jars one by one and placed them on what would become two "shelves" -

The process proved quite tricky in order to get something approaching an interesting composition -

Michelle filled several pages in addition to these -

Janet, too, did more than one drawing. I hope you can see the loose lines that eventually form the eyes -

 Joyce's (colourful, large, pregnant) African scorpion  -

Carol's ballot box dates to a vote from 1800; the last paper arrived 39 years later; the academic robe of the Faculty of Dental Surgery has a badge showing Hunter’s experimental dental graft of a human canine tooth embedded into a cockerel’s cockscomb (read about it here) -

 Sue was attracted by the colours of jars with eggs of the spotted dogfish, dissected to show embryos -

Tool of the week: Janet has been using the ipad for digital painting; the app is Artrage -

Extended drawing - third term, week 4

"Research, archive, playing with ideas, experimenting with materials" is on the schedule.  I am lagging a bit behind with all of those; still at the "too much thinking" stage, have done very little that could be called action. Still hoping to catch up, though!

Tonight we move on the "editing, refining".

Last week Mario talked about the work of Sigmar Polke and Mary Kelly, before setting us loose  to play with ideas and experiment with materials.

"Pushing and mixing things", Polke was subversive and political. He responded to and commented on found images.  The two images below are from his 1976 series "We petty bourgois" - the grid hold it all together; it's "almost a pseudo-narrative" and it's up to the viewer to make the connections

 Polke's first works were made in 1964 - are they naive, or simply too plain?

 His work is "Capitalist Realism" - taking the piss out of the East German love of capitalist ideas.

In the Watchtower series of 1984 he gives the same image different treatmnts -

 The work of Marry Kelly shows her process. Postpartum Document 1973-79 was installed in a way that you could see development - it used her baby son's nappy liners, elaborated with text; it's confessional art.

My "idea of the week" was to use text in my Home drawings, somehow. In the spaciousness of Room 406, I used large sheets of paper and ink to play around with text, phrases taken from "Geography of Home" by Akiko Busch, which had been sitting on my bookshelf patiently for some years. Taking forward the idea of "crumpled paper = crumpled bedsheets", I took phrases from the chapter on the bedroom (which is also a way to incorporate Gaston Bachelard's quote about "home is where we can dream" -

Over coffee during the break, someone mentioned being told to "draw" text rather then write it. So I worked upside down, pencilling the shapes and highlighting them with ink in various dilutions -

In its current form - A3 size - the texts look rather like political posters ... which is not what I'm aiming at.

Mario suggested writing them on actual bedding - pillows - or using them as wallpaper. Well, maybe...

Books, books, books

Reading pile, 2012 - from the college library, mostly

Persephone bookshop

Liminal books, books in transition

A pictorial wish-list, snapped over the past few years - something to be getting on with -

 

And then there are these, Tony's choices -

Current reading: Bill Bryson on what is(n't) known about William Shakespeare's life. There's a lot of fascinating context.

One book at a time!