Rubbed

Frottage with simple shapes.

Start with the uppermost, the choose where to stop

Rubbed with a wax candle, then inked over

Garden visit

An evening opening of the gardens at Fenton House, Hampstead - and a tour and talk by Andy the gardener, who obviously loves his job and has grand plans, though I'm not sure about his passion for echiums - size isn't everything!

A glass of wine on arrival

Roses clamber on old walls

In the orchard, queen anne's lace and fritillary have just finished; the trees are pruned to let light in and low enough that the fruit can be picked without a ladder (health&safety...)

Andy had spent 10 years working at Kew and gave us lots of information not just about the gardens and plants now under his care, but also about general matters like slug control - "meticulous hygiene ... and when you find them you just squash them".

View from the house seems to end in hedges

Beyond the hedges is the rose garden

Poetry Thursday - a sonic journey

From today, till 16 July, you can download a piece by Blake Morrison (poet) and Gavin Bryars (composer) commissioned for the Yorkshire Festival. Or listen here via soundcloud.

It's a series of pieces meant to be listened to on the stopping train journey from Goole (Bryars' birthplace: "If water is the wellspring of music, where better to be born than Goole" wrote Morrison) to Hull ... or vice versa ... or elsewhere, wherever you are.

Read about it here; it's a route not without interest:

"While researching the project, Morrison got off at Hessle and wandered down to the foreshore, where he found cellophane wrapped bouquets laid on benches and tied to trees. Each bunch of flowers, Morrison relates, “naming a few of the hundreds who’ve fallen / – Beth, Lee, Jane, Catherine, Yvonne – / and nowhere as lonely as this place / they climbed to, high in the rigging, / above the mudflats and wind-scuffed tides, / where gulls cry and mist softens the welding”.

"The words are accompanied by the viola, cello and bass of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, with an electric guitar mournfully wailing like a train whistle as we roll beneath grey skies through a captivatingly lugubrious landscape of low-lying sheep fields and windfarms, as damp and flat as Graham Swift’s Waterland, as saturnine as WG Sebald’s Suffolk."

Humber Bridge (via)

Exhibition in Hastings

If you're in Hastings - or to be accurate, St Leonards, which adjoins it - in the next little while, do come and see photos by a group of four photographers, Tony among them, who went to Montana and Yellowstone last autumn.

The show is at Hastings Arts Forum, 36 Marina, St Leonards on Sea, open 11-5 Tues-Friday.

The dates of the exhibition are 28 June to 10 July - you might be able to see that in the photo - but you might not be able to see that there's a private view on Saturday 2 July, 2-6 pm, to which you (dear reader) are cordially invited.

The gallery is just across the street from the sea, so why not come to Hastings/St Leonards and make a day of it, perhaps going to see the new Jerwood Gallery. Or pop in to see the "Animal Logic" exhibition of photos by Wolf Suschitzky at Lucy Bell. Or ... sit on the beach and look out to sea!

Drawing Tuesday - ikat textiles at Brunei Gallery

Some of the textiles were amazingly complicated - and so skilful in their execution. It was the simple ones that attracted me and brought out the coloured pencils ("Laurentian", bought in Canada ... last century!) -

Drawing required a different kind of "system" than the weaving that had created the fabric in the first place. And a different kind of thinking about what was happening.

Some of the black dots had a white line through them - perhaps because that was where the thread holding the hank together during dyeing was tied - but why would other dots be elongated? Technical matters... Note how the back of the velvet (from Uzbekistan) is less contrasted, and how the pile reappears briefly in the twist in the loop.

Two hours happily spent "colouring". Then I had another look around and found, upstairs, pieces from Japan - including this waistcoat, my favourite piece in the entire exhibition -

a touch of red

Colour ... coloured pencils ... was so necessary!

Najlaa's patterning -

 Jo's little people in the windows -

 Carol's colour mixing -

 Sue's coat of many colours -

 Later, as we waited in the cafe for the after-lunch rain to stop, Sue didn't waste time but drew a few of the other customers -

The exhibition finishes on 25 June at 5pm and is well worth a visit.

A year ago

Last year Tony and spent the month of June in Berlin, made possible by a house exchange.

We often went to the Turkish supermarket, round the corner in the next block.

A year ago Berlin was very chilly! But it was wonderful. An unrepeatable adventure.

Evening clouds

After being out gallivanting all day, seeing exhibitions (Underwater Cities at the BM, and the collection - and a room of Jasper Johns prints - at the Courtauld) and "having coffee", on the way home I noticed a half-moon in the western part of the sky, among clouds still let by the sun -

Sunlit cloud

Once home (and fed), coming upstairs to use thecomputer, I saw that the mood lighting had changed -

Moonlit cloud

Goodnight sun, goodnight moon! Doing art and having coffee is a wonderfully stimulating, but ultimately rather tiring, way to spend the day.

Photoshop discovery - quick selection

This exciting new facet of Photoshop is due to the slip of a curson. Colour in bright areas tends to disappear when the camera is set on automatic. I was trying to restore the pale pink to the white peonies, and instead of clicking on the Lasso tool, I got the Quick Selection tool instead ... something I've not used but now obviously have to investigate.

The text on the screenshot points to the Quick Selection tool. Once you've clicked on it, you go to your image and click on the areas you want to work with - and it quickly defines the borders of an area of uniform colour. You can select many areas, one after another.

After you've selected the area(s), you can manipulate the colour.

To make the white less bright - ie, to give the other shades a chance - I used Levels (Ctrl+L). Note the position of the sliders in the original, above, and the manipulated version, below.

You can see the difference in the photo, especially in the pink of the larger flower.

Not a great photo, there's no subtlety, but at least you get an idea of the colour and texture rather than seeing just a block of brightness.

I used this trick in the larger flowers of the hydrangeo -

 but not in the foxglove -

Out the window

It's a challenge to turn on the camera and click before the dog disappears.

I spend a lot of time at the computer at the moment, with half an eye on the window and street.

There's a dog-friendly park at the end of the street, hence the comings and goings.

Extended drawing - small decisions

Getting work together for the end-of-course exhibition. If you're in the Holborn area on Tuesday 21 June, 6-8pm, drop in to City Lit, 3rd floor, for a glass of wine and the private view.

Using a 5cm square to assess the size of paper needed for printing onto -

 In the end, various A4 papers were on hand, which made for an easy decision in terms of size at least.

Meanwhile the digital drawings went through a couple of metamorphoses. First, collated into a sheet of squares, adjusted to be monochrome. I'm trying to make the drawings look as simple as possible, to strip their information right back - from the photograph to the selected lines of the drawing, and then presented in a simple way. This compilation is for printing out, cutting up, trying out in book form, perhaps stitched into a concertina book -

But the main work is even less complicated than that. Each image was first inverted to look like a "negative" and then printed [thanks, Mary!] at 5x5cm size on a thick, creamy paper with a bit of tooth. Five images should be enough to fill the display case -

The display cases are 115cm wide, which will accommodate five sheets, but four might look better. To be decided on Monday.

A close-up of one of the drawings -

Poetry Thursday - Friend Sleeping by Cesare Pavese

Friend Sleeping

What shall we say tonight to the friend sleeping?
The slightest word leaps to our lips
from deepest pain. We'll look at our friend,
his useless lips that say nothing,
we'll speak submissively.

                            Night will resemble
the old grief each dusk returning,
impassive and alive. Remote silence
will suffer like a soul, mute, in the darkness.
We shall speak to the night which breathes submissively.

We shall hear the moments flow in the darkness
beyond things, in the anxiety of dawn
which will come suddenly, revealing objects
against the silence of death. Useless light
will lay bare the absorbed face of day. Moments
will be silent. And objects will speak submissively.

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950)


The poem is taken from a page opened at random from a book on the poetry shelf - a book not opened for decades.

The pages are brown with age - published 1971 -

In the foreword, translator and editor Margaret Crossland says that the poems "explore more clearly than his other writings Pavese's nostalgia for country life and childhood, his awareness of social change and his deep understanding of people as isolated as himself."


Also on the topic of poetry:

Seen in the media this week: an article, by the former head of the Poetry Society, about the uses (and abuses?) of memorising poetry.

Wordless Wednesday

Drawing Tuesday - my "domestic museum"

A sustained downpour - the wettest day of the week - meant everyone arrived dripping - coats and umbrellas quite filled the bathroom -

and Sue found a corner from which to capture the scene -

Later, to take away the "sinister" feeling, she added more colour -

Jo found a different perspective, from the floor outside the bathroom door -

Caryl pulled up a chair near the dried-out lilies, which I'd saved in case anyone might want to draw them -

 Joyce had a go too -

Fortunately there was a statue of a horse, which could be moved to the table for Janet to draw -

and Michelle was drawing it from the other side -

Najlaa was sat at the table too, intrigued by various bits of crockery -

Mags was upstairs using watercolour to capture the stoneware inkwells (remember how collectible they were in the 1970s?) -

Note how the colours she used are found in her kantha scarf. Coincidence?

Having other people around, drawing, helped me to at last put pen to paper in the house.

You might not be able to see the "flat pottery lady" sitting on the bookshelf - she has definitely not been one of my favourite things, and represents some of the negative things about my relationship to the house. Once that was out of the way, I enjoyed drawing the chair, starting at the top, and was pleased that it ended up fitting onto the page.

At lunch, we were nine around the table -