Photo miscellany

Some quiet moments in the life of a camera -

"Hello! I got here all by myself!"

 

Submission for a fundraiser

Looking down

Looking up 

"Take me home! That's why I'm on the wall!"

Stairway to Heaven

Summertime at the local Turkish

A dotterell ... awwwww

Dramatic dawn sky

How to make a simple envelope:

On the walk to the studio -

Old sign: Glen Farm Dairy
Newsagent Tobacconist & Grocer

Tree pit and Morris Minor

Left "on the wall", hoping for a new home

Poetry Thursday - La Barcheta by Pietro Buratti

(via)

La barcheta

La note è bela,
Fa presto, o Nineta,
Andemo in barcheta
I freschi a ciapar!
A Toni g'ho dito
Ch'el felze el ne cava
Per goder sta bava
Che supia dal mar.
Ah! 

Che gusto contarsela
Soleti in laguna,
E al chiaro de luna
Sentirse a vogar!
Ti pol de la ventola
Far senza, o mia cara,
Chè zefiri a gara
Te vol sventolar.
Ah! 

Se gh'è tra de lori
Chi troppo indiscreto
Volesse da pèto
El velo strapar,
No bada a ste frotole,
Soleti za semo
E Toni el so' remo
Lè a tento a menar.
Ah!

The words are by Pietro Buratti (1772-1832), set to music by Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947) and published in 1901 as one of the Venetian Songs.

I heard it recently in a concert by the City Chorus, sung by Daniel Turner. Hear it sung by Gerard Souzay here; other versions are available online, for instance the entire song cycle, sung by Joyce DiDonato, starts with a story about Hahn performing it in a gondola, playing a grand piano as he was poled along. A 1909 recording of Hahn - composer, singer, accompanist -  is here.

And now for the English translation (by Laura Sarti):

The Little Boat

The night is beautiful.
Make haste, Nineta,
let us take to our boat
and enjoy the evening breeze.
I have asked Toni
to remove the canopy
so that we can feel the zephyr
blowing in from the sea. Ah!

What bliss it is to exchange sweet nothings
alone on the lagoon
and by moonlight,
to be borne along in our boat!
You can lay aside
your fan, my dear,
for the breezes will vie with each other
to refresh you. Ah!

If among them
there should be one so indiscreet
as to try to lift the veil
shielding your breast,
pay no heed to its nonsense,
for we are all alone
and Toni is much too intnent
on plying his oar. Ah!

"Up betimes" said Pepys in his diary, and it was the brightness of the pre-sunrise sky that got me up - the orange glow out the bedroom window, promising yet another splendidly sunny day and mandating yet another garden-watering session.

The leftover papers from the 100 Drawings course, lying on the studio/storeroom floor, are crying out to be used in some way. Eraser, pencils, and a postcard showing a piece by Susan Jane Dunford were at hand -

Other visual material also happened to be nearby -

 Using a squiggly line for shading, a nice change from cross-hatching -

 The soft pencil smudged satisfyingly under the eraser -

An A2 sized sheet of pre-used cartridge paper -

While my attention was on the drawing, elsewhere in the room the sunlight was carving out another still life -

Drawing Tuesday - Serpentine

The Serpentine Gallery is showing Tomma Abts in the "new" gallery (till 9 Sept), and in the "old" one is the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude towards the installation in the Serpentine itself, Mastaba, made of thousands of oil drums, resting on or in the water (till 23 September) -

I ignored the barrels and went for the teasels; my teasel wasn't botanically accurate but I did enjoy looking closely and finding ways to "evoke" it -

Bees on a teasel

Teasels on a page

then wandered around the Tomma Abts show, intrigued by the way the pictures were placed within the environment and distracted by how inadvertent aspects of the environment can distract from the work on show - or rather, add a different sort of interest -

We congregated, one after another, in the Pavilion, with its shallow area of water and reflective ceiling -

Ceiling reflection

 Jo's new sketchbook is waiting for "next time" -

 Judith had lucidly rendered Christo's barrels -

The white is a Uniball Signo Gel pen

 ... as had Sue -

 Najlaa was intrigued by the unbuilt Mastaba, in Dubai - 126.8 metres long -

 Carol spent the summer's day making rubbings of leaves from the park and gathering them into a collage -

Leaf rubbing was last week's "homework" - the magnolia leaves I'd used were leathery and very tough, and the shamrock-like leaves were thin and tender -

 but gave good rubbings (8B lumograph pencil)-

 and left their colours pressed into the paper they'd rested on -

 Extra-curricularly, Sue had painted a background and applied letter-like shapes

cut with a scalpel from paper that had been painted blue. On discarding it, she noticed that it could be laid over a background itself -

If you zoom in to the photo, you'll see that the cut-out shapes have a very narrow white strip around them - the white paper that had been painted.

100 drawings in a day - course at City Lit

The pace on this day-long course, as you might expect, was fast and furious. Well not exactly furious - concentrated is a better description. Or hectic, at times.

We started out with a pile of paper and various mediums - pen, pencil, graphite, pastel, charcoal - and had each brought an object, an image, and a piece of text. 

Drawing our object (30 sec, sometimes with non-dominant hand)
- and each time the objects were passed along

Combining my "sprinkler" with neighbour's headphones - 30 sec,
then move the position of objects

Repeat - 10 seconds! - sparse, strong lines

 After the flurry of timed drawings, we had 3 minutes to trace off elements -

I didn't want to cut up that sheet, so quickly did another to cut up. Then we arranged them -

Everyone circled the room looking at other people's work, then rearranged someone else's work. Back at my own table, I found ...

Another tour round the room, defining smaller compositions within someone else's work -

 A kind stranger identified these compositions in my work -

Then we disassembled everything and recombined in a new work. I was influenced by the first rearrangement -

Now it was time to use our image, drawing it in combination with our object, which we moved to different parts of the image -

Masking parts of the image - I used loose paper - and then passing it to a neighbour; she had used masking tape on her notebook, and the next exercise was to draw the masking rather than the image -

I'm not unhappy with the one on the left

After this, masking tape took centre stage - we used it to draw our image, or part of it, on a huge sheet of paper in what seemed like 30 seconds but may have been 3 minutes, then exchanged images and did it again. Next step, add pen or pencil marks to each of the taped images to elaborate them -

Working very quickly!

Then, remove the tape from one of them and make a new image. You can see where the tape came from, and it's the basis of this augmented work, made the next day -

The rubbing is from this image, also augmented, with extra tape that held the drawings in a roll for taking home -

Amazing how clear and/or expressive a rubbing of something as flat as masking tape can be!

At some point we had traced from our image onto four small pieces of tracing paper, trying to capture details -

 ... and then laid them out in a way that pleased us -

Candidate for future development

Individual explanations of negative space gave some time to play around with a combination of images and use of darker areas to create negative space ... if, indeed, that's what was going on...

 Then, or perhaps it was at some earlier point, or later point - everything was getting rather confusing!! - we drew around and cut out the shape of our object from a paper with "any old text" on it ... and used that text to make some sort of composition, and transfer it onto tracing paper. I think I didn't follow the instructions to the letter, but like the idea of words drifting through the air....

Very little, made with very little

Words drifting into a sort of sunset ... rubbing with pastel (messy!)

By the time everyone else was rushing round the room finding surfaces for rubbing, I had only enough energy to use what was within arm's reach -

Graphite stick and chalky pastel

Different grades of sandpaper

Finally, the wrap-up - choosing two pieces to lay out on our table. The photo cuts off part of the "10-second" piece, but you've seen the whole thing earlier -

Made during a quiet time (left) and early in the day (right)

Two other pieces that I'll keep are the graphite drawing of the masked image and the four-layer detailed tracing. Everything came home with me, so that the sediment could settle and I could review the day -

Most will be recycled - it was about the process, and about
the energy in the room generated by tutor, students, and the pace

Four drawings to keep, and two techniques for future use in making "works on paper" - rubbing sandpaper for shading or crumpled masking tape for random texture, and tracing layers of detail. 

Plus, I feel quicker and freer - ready to make big, dark marks....