Poetry Thursday - Anne Stevenson and John Clare celebrate a humble weed

"thou humble flower" (via)

Ragwort

They won’t let railways alone, those yellow flowers.
They’re that remorseless joy of dereliction
darkest banks exhale like vivid breath
as bricks divide to let them root between.
How every falling place convoys their smile,
taking what’s left and making a song of it.

Anne Stevenson (b.1933)

While looking for a picture of ragwort, I came across another poem about it, by John Clare (1793-1864):

Ragwort thou humble flower with tattered leaves

I love to see thee come and litter gold...

Thy waste of shining blossoms richly shields

The sun tanned sward in splendid hues that burn

So bright and glaring that the very light

Of the rich sunshine doth to paleness turn

And seems but very shadows in thy sight.

Getting out the pots

The surfaces in my (reclaimed) studio are overrun by ceramics made over the past three or four years -

These are the ones that interest me more -

The idea is to make groupings of them - families perhaps, or "conversations" - and the sticking-point, in terms of exhibiting them at all, is how to display them. (Answers on a postcard, please!)

A chance to exhibit a group arose and I spent quite a lot of time finding The Group. Yes it was fun -

Singletons, and backgrounds

Groups, and angles

The shortlist -

Porcelain books

With metal threads

Made with sinamay scraps - see the fabric version here

I chose the "splash" group, and it will be in the Readymade show at City Lit until 29 August. The PV is 5.30-7 on Thursday 3rd August, do come along if you can - there will be work from students in all sorts of media.

Drawing Tuesday - Southwark Cathedral

The weather was good, so some of us stayed outside. I found an unappealing view of largely unappealing buildings and decided to have a go anyway -

Cheesegrater and Walkietalkie take centre stage

Bamboo pen and india ink on top; felt pen beneath

 The bronze lettering ran along the parapet, attached to the stone - but the colon had fallen off. I looked carefully at the letter forms and their spacing, but looking is quite a different thing to freehand drawing! The numbers come from memorials inside the cathedral.

 The real thing -

(via)

Sue's statue -

There's not information about the piece nearby. An image search finds that it could be a Roman - or Greek - warrior, or Minerva - indeed Minerva it is, by Alan Collins - he also has work at Guildford Cathedral.

Carol found several items of interest, including the shoes of Edward Stuart Talbot (bishop of Southward 1905-11) -

Judith's courtyard scene -

Jo's door, carefully fitted to match the masonry -

Najlaa found intriguing "trail marks" in the garden - they represent paths travelled through life -

They are part of the memorial to Mahomet Weyonomon, a chief of the Mohegan tribe in Conneticut who had come to London in the 18th century to achieve justice for his people but died of smallpox and was buried in unconsecrated ground. This "domed medallion" (or sculpture; drawn by Sue) is linked with him - it symbolises the spiritual force that flows through all things.

Janet captures the interior of the church -

Joyce's stained glass window, from afar -

Extracurricular activities

Sections of a monoprint - the ones with "bird shapes" and other nature - selected and sewn together by Joyce -

Another piece Joyce made in a Pauline Burbidge workshop - quilting first and printing after -

Sue's Norwegian clouds -

Judith has been making intriguing stackable sculptures -

Carol is continuing with stories of the adventures of Duck, Tiger and Giraffe, based on events in the life of her grandsone -

Najlaa has been wrestling with bargello patchwork -

And Janet has been quilting, but it's a bit of a secret just yet -

Afterwards...

some of us went to Intaglio Printmakers, in Playhouse Court off Southwark Bridge Road

Its basement premises is filled with desirable, enticing supplies -

On the way to the tube we saw some of the minor wonders in the area, including the Hop Exchange and, across the street from it, this wonderful facade -

Southwark was the epicentre of the hop trade in the 1860s.

Diarising - and why things go wrong

Is "diarising" a real word? I mean it to mean "keeping a diary"; documenting the days as they whizz past. Is this something you do? Does it take you away from living in the moment? And does it capture the moments you want to remember? These are questions that might concern us as we get older and our brains fill up (well, it feels like the brain is completely full up, sometimes).

My diarising is via the camera. I still carry the little notebook and try not to be lazy, to get it out at odd moments and write odd things down, but the camera - now smaller than ever, in my phone - gets the action. And from the phone the photos are magically sent to the computer and stored without any effort on my part ... though I really do miss "being in control" - I still haven't figured out how to get to certain older photos quickly, or how to transfer a selection of photos to the computer's storage. (it's on my list.) Possibly making Albums would help with this.

So let's look at some photos from yesterday. After a lazy morning I had a two-hour journey to Ham, thanks to believing that the Overground wasn't running. Duh, and double-duh - I'd seen on Saturday that the Gospel Oak-Barking line wasn't running, and when Citymapper, the getting-around-london app, didn't show the Overground on its selection of routes, I put 2 and 2 together and got 55. The "full" brain became a downright silly brain. Note to self: Think, and Check.

Never mind, plenty to do while on the move, thanks to the wonderful phone - here's the podcast I was listening to, on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) -
http://www.radiolab.org/story/137407-talking-to-machines/

("We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.")

What my little brainstorm meant, though, was finding a way back home that would be quicker, and again it was Duh and Double-Duh - taking the train to Victoria - from the station that the Overground uses ... did I think to check its platform? No, I was fixated on catching the 16.27 and in was 16.23 and, well, I just never thought of it, I'd ruled out the Overground on the basis of my own false assumptions. Note to self: Keep questioning those assumptions!! 

On the bus on the way to the train station, I saw the river glinting in the distance and of course had to get a photo or two while the bus stopped -

The day promised - and delivered - rain

Ah, that mirror - let's get a photo and think about the perspective
 it shows; could that be something to use later...

Terrible photo (reflective bus window, for one thing) but how
homely and sentimental is that fantasy of the family bike ride...

My final example of how we can lead ourselves astray by false, or inadequate, thinking, concerns the train back to Victoria. It stopped at Vauxhall, the station before Victoria, which has an interchange with the Victoria line, which gets me home. So off I jumped - only to find something I should have known, as I'd used the Vic line on Saturday: the stations south of Victoria were closed this weekend. 

Every cloud has a silver lining. It wasn't raining yet, and I needed another 6,000 steps to hit my daily target, so I walked, doesn't take long - especially if you don't stop to take photos! But along the grimness of Vauxhall Bridge Road I couldn't resist these -

"Former premises" of "makers and sellers of paint"

"A job carefully done"

"A rural idyll"

The quotes are from this site, a delightful discovery - it details overlooked English buildings, " breweries, prefabs, power stations, corrugated-iron barns and the occasional parish church ". Definitely a blog to bookmark.

And the upshot of this tale of travel-gone-wrong, and making the best of it, and reflecting on why things go wrong, is the chance to take new opportunities and find new things. Of course the downside of finding new things is that they need to fight for brain-space, which is already in short supply. Note to self: Investigate current thinking on ageing brains.

At the end of the day, from my desk, a final photo of the sun streaming straight down the street before it dips over Crouch Hill -

Capture the moment

Sunday morning

An early start to the planned tidying of bedroom and closet - with a diversion outdoors to clip some lavender to put among the clothes - and scarves, especially - that don't get used quite so often.

 Once the morning dew has dried, I'll run up some sachets (now that the sewing machine is accessible!).

Then a leisurely breakfast with leftover cake, lots of fruit, greek yogurt, and lots&lots of coffee (decaffienated) -

And now, off to socialise with lovely people. Never mind the impending rain...

Japanese woodcut printing, part 2

Friday was all about printing, but at 6am my fourth block was still to be cut. I decided to use the lines - perhaps in nostalgia for my "travel lines".

At class, there was still much to be done before any printing could start. Registration lines to be added, edges of non-printing areas to be beveled, the blocks checked and generally tidied up, at which point I discovered an entire uncut corner of one of them ... hmm, how did that happen!

After an hour we were ready to run the block under the tap (right) and wrap it (left) in a damp teatowel and then plastic - it would have a couple of hours for the water to soak into the wood fibres -

Having folded sheets of newsprint into a book, we wet alternate pages (starting at the back) and wrapped them in plastic - this would be the damp pack for the printing paper -

The paper was cut to size to fit the area marked out on the blocks. Because it had deckle edges, one edge needed cutting off to give a basis for measuring our little sheets -

The sheets went into the damp pack, to be taken out as needed and returned between printings.

The nori (rice starch) paste needed thinning down, stirring with a chopstick as water was added little by little. The desired consistency is reached when it drops off the end of  the chopstick. Containers with lids keep the nori from drying and thickening -

Dabbing the nori onto the areas to be printed, after which a soft brush is used to smooth it out -

Then it's the turn of the pigment -

again with the brush -

Several applications of pigment may be needed, until the printing surface is properly covered.

The paper, lifted from the damp pack, is placed into the registration marks -

Being thin, it was covered with a sheet of baking paper to stop the baren rubbing loose the fibres -

Note the position for holding the baren.

Pigments: ordinary watercolours. First I wanted a pale grey for the background, the block with lines. A tube of Paynes Grey was available, and I also mixed up burnt umber with ultramarine (bottom), and viridian with alizarin crimson (top), but at the dilution I was using, you couldn't see much difference -

It was rather thrilling to see the layers building up, and to play with the colours -

A further step is to stretch the print - it dries, then is briefly dampened again, and placed on a surface (eg perspex) and taped round (in one direction, eg clockwise) with sellotape, which is rubbed onto the paper to hold it firm. When the tape is removed, it takes just a few of the fibres of the paper with it -

To my right, Mags was well away with beaches and groynes and beach huts -

An important thing is knowing how to sharpen the different tools. We were given a basic set of tools to use and keep, but even these work better if kept in good condition. So, find the bevel and first use the coarse stone

then remove the burr and finish off on the finer stone -

Here's a lovely bit of cutting - look at those thin lines! The block is a work of art in itself -

 -

Samples of the finished prints

After class I went along to Intaglio to get a few things (brushes paper, sharpening stone) so that I could finish up my set, and perhaps play with the blocks in different ways -

 When I took the prints out of my plastic folder, 24 hours after the class, they were still damp, hence the buckling. Back in a damp pack before further printing, they'll straighten out, and after printing there's the stretching process for the ones worth keeping.

The one at top right is the most complete, it has all four layers, but unfortunately it has unwanted inking -

 Perhaps I used too much nori and made the block too wet? After seeing that, I used a scrap of the absorbent paper to mop between the motifs, and that helped a bit -

The yellow and violet print over the grey areas quite well, but the green is wildly misregistered on the right side -

Possibly the paper was badly placed, but it's also likely that my tracing for the grey layer was inaccurate. There's a lot needs looking out for! It's a bit like learning how to drive - you have to practice and practice till things become automatic.

Next step, making more blocks, based on a photo I took on the way to Intaglio, as a result of an idea I'd had on the way to class. Something caught my eye that just seemed right - but I must reconsdier it away from the heat of the moment. I quite like it when things happen quickly, so that you're swept up with the enthusiasm and urgency of it all.