The coincidence of proximity

Going through some of my old photo files lately (the pix are filed by month) I noticed that the screen sometimes showed nice groupings. Here are a few of the "quartets".

March 2014 -

French knots, front and back, on the convenient grid of a printed linen napkin.
I just had the urge to make lots and lots of french knots...

Erased diaries (ink, sprayed with water, left to dry) and some sad objects
encountered somewhere ... a coincidence, but something seems to connect them ...

"What the camera sees" on a walk near Queens Park

The yellow train ("Stand behind the yellow line")

 July 2014 -

Daily painting - photographing the changes - it was such fun

September 2013 -

Train windows, with reflected sunset

 November 2013 -

Percival David collection of Chinese ceramics, British Museum

Choosing materials for "Binders Keepers" - and wrapped railings.
There's not really any "subconscious" connection, just a visual harmony

Structures, found in magazines. Imagine building these!

 And when were these taken? Doesn't matter ...

Pottery patterns, pretty...

January 2016 - road works along Chamberlayne Road - an eternity of traffic buildups, slow bus journeys, closed bus stops....

 February 2014 -

Street action, Stroud Green Road (from my window ... looking for good compositions)

 March 2017 -

Part of the Tate Britain experience ... Friends' Room, and bookshop

Outside Tate Modern - those sinister umbrellas...

 

What pleasure these recent primulas have given me!

In addition to the quartets, with a change of screen size some sextets emerged -

Fred Williams' Pilbarra series of paintings

Crowd flow, Liverpool Street Station

There are duets, too many to capture and post.

Ceramics course - so far

We have had four of the six classes in this short, Monday-evening course. I'm in a corner, dipping my pots, while the others do surface decoration.

The first week there was no porcelain casting slip. I didn't have much ready, anyway, so sat there and sewed up a couple of pots. 

The first batch for the kiln. Those in the centre contain no metal

The second week I purchased one of the new pots of slip (at an educational price) - not that I don't have similar at home (somewhere). And dipped five pots. And tried to get them dry enough to go into the kiln immediately, but no luck there. Better to leave them to dry properly.

Dipped and dry

The third week, I cleaned up the bottoms and put those with metal into sagars (new policy for city lit kilns). Then left the building.


The fourth week, I had spent quite a few hours making more pots. Which would get dipped and how many of those would be ready for the kiln?

The temporary studio!

The first of the new fabric pots - I especially liked the raffia(?) scrap and how
 it responded to bold stitching with a starchy thread

Some had come out of the kiln -

Two without metal, two with pins, one with staples

and others were about to get ready to go in -

Some yet to do...

Dipped and dripping. The crumpled newspaper spreads the threads and keeps the
tops of the pots from narrowing. Same idea with the thin slices of thick cardboard tube.
Both will be removed before firing; even if they were left, they would just burn away

Not dry enough, not cleaned up ... ready for the kiln next week

The circles are proving useful not just for keeping the tops open during dipping, but also for constraining the size of the pot (they are cut from a particularly rigid mailing tube). A few constraints would be useful at this point: I'm all over the place.

I like the ease of using staples, especially with the on-the-bias pieces

Two recent concoctions suggest further ways forward -

...the meandering line of gold against a plain background, and the lines of stitch following the folds in a pole-wrapped shibori piece. Both are polyester and have been steamed so that they'll hold their shape - I know from experience that the folds will stay in, but will the cylinder simply collapse or has the steaming made it "stiffer"?

Tube steps

tfl (Transport for London) has lots of info about walking on its website - and now has come up with a tube "map"* giving the number of steps between Underground (and Overground) stations - 100 steps a minute is a comfortable pace, they reckon (your mileage may vary).

London has a river running through it, and the tube runs under the river. It doesn't take long to spot some numbers floating in the river -

Wapping to Rotherhithe, 4900 steps; Island Gardens to Cutty Sark, 1200 steps

There's a pedestrian tunnel to Greenwich, but how do you get from Wapping to Rotherhithe on foot? Ah, via Tower Bridge - 46 minutes, 2.3 miles. "It's quicker by tube", as the old saying goes. (When is the Overground really the Underground?)

Another little quibble is that some of the linked stations could do with having step counts for the transfers between lines. Has anyone counted the number of steps at Green Park to get from Jubilee Line to Victoria Line - or at Waterloo to get from Jubilee Line to Bakerloo Line?

*It's not really a map, it's not to scale - it's a diagram.

Poetry Thursday - Of their peculiar light, by Emily Dickinson

Something interesting from instagram

I went to the internet to find the rest of the poem - and was shocked that this is all there is -

Of their peculiar lightI keep one ray
To clarify the Sight
To seek them by—

It needs "more" - not just because any Emily Dickinson poem that I've encountered seems to have consisted of two stanzas. However a little research dispells that illusion - she wrote at many lengths in her 1775 poems, some dozens of lines long - see for yourself here. (This one in number 1362.)

The poem seems to "need more" to clarify "their" and "them" - are these referring to the same thing? It's a puzzling poem ... well, so many of hers are ... but then, shouldn't a poem leave behind something to think about?

Dickinson's punctuation has long puzzled scholars - to the extent that it was ignored for many years. I like the way Jen Bervin has used the punctuation, transposing it to textiles, and wrote about it a few years back.

In the counting-house

"The King was in the counting-house
Counting out his money,
The Queen was in the parlour
Eating bread and honey"

This morning my "one bag at a time" sortie into The Storeroom was an encounter with a heavy bag that turned out to contain a tin of old coins. I sorted them into little bags, which was fun (so many foreign coins, Brasil and Argentina and Russia and pre-EU countries) and was just thinking of where their "place" might be, when the thought arrived of some other places other coins could be lurking.

"A job worth doing ..." (you know the rest of that old saying) ... so my bowlful of coins came out of the drawer, but must wait, I need to go out for the rest of the day. So much for the good, finished job...

The sorted coins can join the bowl, back in the desk drawer. Tomorrow is Desk Day (it's on the calendar, two hours scheduled for Thursday mornings for the next few weeks, to get on top of the paperwork) and might well start with sorting that catch-all drawer. Though you might well call that ploy by its real name: procrastination.

What a lot of little things need keeping on top of. The King had it easy, in his counting house, gloating over his coins while his stewards did all the work!

Drawing Tuesday - Brunei Gallery

So much to choose from in the Embroidered Tales exhibition! Drawn by the "story" of this piece - that the leaves of the tree of life represent prayers - I sat down and got to work.

Mirrored script at the base of the panel

The leaves are mirrored too, and contain representations of fish and turtles

I drew only half of each "leaf"

Then coloured in the central sections

Mags found the shapes came easily in her warm-up drawings,
but less so when drawing the details

Sue carefully represented the stitches of embroidery

Judith's page shows both detail and possibility

 "How do you sharpen a coloured pencil" was the question - why do they so often break during sharpening, is it the lead or is it the fault of the sharpener? We got out pencil sharpeners and also some other useful portable tools, tiny tape dispenser and folding scissors -

 My crayons, gift of dear friend Rita in the 1990s, will last another few decades -

 Mags told how a very useful book fortuitously came her way via a charity shop -

Art surveillance

"Hope you enjoyed Hockney" said the email from Tate, sent 24 hours after I visited the exhibition. And that alienated me, to the point of wanting to cancel my new membership - which is probably over-reaction.

Of course the gallery is keeping track of visitors when it scans the barcode on the card as you show it to enter the exhibition. So why shouldn't it "add value" and/or "niche market" by telling individual visitors that they can find further info about the exhibition/artist on p44 of their magazine?

Because some of us still want to think - or I do, however mistakenly - that barcode-scanning surveillance is about getting attendance statistics, rather than getting data on individuals. Anyone under 35 will tell you that this is foolish misconception, "no point in worrying about it". But I wonder who will eventually see such individualised data, and to what purpose.

We've had a precedent for this in the matter of library books, way back when. Librarians refused to reveal who had borrowed certain books, and good for them. Machines won't have such scruples, and I'd rather that the people who program those machines and collect the data observe the same principles.

Is contacting me about my actions infringing my privacy or civil liberties? I don't know ... but it feels like the thin, sharp, end of the wedge.

Week in review

It's been a week of (over)indulgence in tulips - 

Sunday finds three vasesful, in various stages of aging, dotted around the room. And in the garden, these little joys -

Now a change of scale - in the back garden, view from my window of the tree in full fig -

With the CQ newsletter sent to the printer, I've had time to go to see some things -

Beautiful pulkharis and other embroideries

18th century architecture at 63 New Cavendish Street, and temptation at Asia House Fair

Popping in to the October Gallery and finding work by Brion Gysin

... and Tian Wei

At the Estorick Collection, Sydney Carline's drawings and paintings as a WWI war artist
(drawn in the cockpit of his Sopwith Camel, finished once back on the ground)
and modern work by Keith Roberts, here, "Caporetto" - a punishing and brutal battle in which the
Italian army suffered tremendous losses; a word which is still used
to mean an utter disaster

Roberts' cardboard "replica" WWI plane

A concert - with photography - in the tunnel shaft at the Brunel Museum

And quite a lot of Tate-ing about ...

Thursday: over the footbridge to Tate Modern on an errand,
without enough energy to indulge in some art

Sunday: to Tate Britain for an early-morning viewing of the Hockney exhibition;
in the main hall, some big but airy sculpture is being installed

In-gallery and augmented-at-home versions of "Man running towards a bit of blue", 1963

I spent as much time having coffee, and then in the bookshop, as in the exhibition.
Came home empty-handed but with a headful of colours and words

Now (Sunday afternoon) I'm preparing more "pots" for Monday evening's ceramics session - three quite large ones are ready to dip, and there are 24 hours to make more - I'm aiming for six more -

After three sessions, a total of only five pots have gone into the kiln. 

No metal on the left (straight into kiln); with metal on the right (goes into sagar first)

My timing for doing this course isn't right; still too much else going on! 

And then there was the Incident of the Beer Forgotten in the Freezer. Ever wonder what happens if you leave it too long? Freezing expands the foamy liquid, and pushes the cap off. Thawing lets the trapped air expand and pushes the foam out, and out, and out, leaving a frozen core which gradually releases its brown liquid.

The result, as you will have guessed, is undrinkable.