Drawing Tuesday - Tate Britain

On the way to the museum I pondered "what to draw" and remembered something that popped into my head on the verge of sleep - a vast expanse of blue covered in writing - so I decided to look for text and writing. But first, the expanse of blue - the college art shop, conveniently to hand, had various blue papers...

and around the gallery were various sorts of writing, text, and marks-that-might-be-writing -

 Getting into it ...

 Using the "research"...

Nope, they're not what I saw behind my closed eyes! I'm still working on it, attending to that little idea to see what will happen. At least it has been realised to some small extent.

Jo's horse and rider, with his fantastic handbag or would that be a saddle bag? -

 Carol's sheep from the Holman Hunt's "Strayed Sheep" -

 ... and animal heads by Henry Moore and Georg Ehrlich

 Sue's political prisoner sculpture -

 Judith's Henry Moore...

 ... and metal punchers -

Extra-curricularly, Carol has been experimenting with knitting a lacy texture and threading it with various ribbons ...

Production lines - seasonal making

"When in doubt, make a book" - or a dozen!

Cut and folded

They are a dos-a-dos format, using a small section of some paper painted (on both sides) at a workshop at Committed to Cloth several years ago -

Punched and ready for sewing with red and yellow linen threads
 (the extra bit of cover will be trimmed later)

The paper bands hold the books closed, but elastic bands are more practical when the books are in use -

The remnants of the paper were used to make gift tags, embroidering a gold star over a red dot -

And a one-off - wreath made from discarded pine (or fir? spruce?) branches - without a firm base to attach the branches to, it was flopping about, so I started again...

 Not much firmer - more of a catherine-wheel than a typical xmas wreath!

Given that someone keeps stealing plants from the pots outside the front door at Rathcoole Gardens, it doesn't seem wise to put anything portable on the door...but it's too warm inside, really.

No glaciers were harmed in the harvesting

24 blocks of ice,  brought from Greenland by artist Olafur Eliasson, are situated outside Tate Modern, gently melting, their water trickling into the Thames.

A little ice-cubelet seems to have been left behind on the foreshore

 The ice looks lovely behind the birches, but "t'aint natural"...

... the ice is real, but its situation is unreal. It's meant to get people thinking. And looking - so many of us have never seen a glacier, let alone been able to touch an iceberg.

"Eliasson worked with geologist Minik Rosing to transport over 100 tonnes of free-floating, glacial ice from the waters of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland. The ice had separated from its sheets and was discovered melting into the ocean." (via)

Elaisson recommends putting an ear to the ice, to hear the little crackles and pops of released air bubbles and splitting as the ice melts.

Another six blocks of ice are deposited about a 10-minute walk away in the City of London, reflected on the rainy pavement -

Studio Saturday

This week seems to have started a ramp-down in the studio, partly because of the seasonal festivities and preparations required elsewhere. partly because I'm having a mokuhanga moment (more on that another time), and partly because it's cold - so I've at least produced some simple fabric shapes and will dip them later -

The kiln is ready for a test firing - cones are set up on each layer to check the temperature. It would be good to have some actual pots in there!

Thanks, Jackie, for helping with all this. The controller still frightens me rather....

In a needle-felting mini-workshop I tried out the idea of using the felting as a way of joining the base fabric into a circle. It does feel lovely, especially with the different texture inside, and may or may not get dipped -

Next steps: more sinamay constructions; add metal detailing; dip and dry; fire. I'm looking forward to ramping-up the process in 2019, even in the cold. (Also, I miss the social side of the studio.)

Poetry Thursday - Does She Like Word-Games? by Wendy Cope

[...it continues over the page...]

She likes sonnets but she doesn't like the sky.

She doesn't like repetition.
She doesn't like repetition.

She doesn't like endings.


The poem appears in Wendy Cope's 1992 collection, Serious Concerns, and is based on a word-game called "Who is Fannee Doolee?" which you can either figure out yourself from the poem or read about here.

Woodblcok Wednesday - advanced course, week 2 of 3

This week we concentrated on betazuri - overprinting to get strong colour - and bokashi, the gradation you often see in woodblock prints -

 Some examples of bokashi -

 And some work by Tuula Moilanen, who uses both these techniques -

We diluted the nori to a stiffer consistency - "pointy" - rather than a rounded drop that fell off the end of the stir-stick -

Drops of nori were put down over the area, and paint (also quite thick) was put down between the drops -

 Mixing happened on the wood -

 ... and the first application doesn't give even coverage -

 so the inking process was repeated -

 The rubbing starts with circular motions and then in lines following the grain -

... then the print goes back in the damp pack while the block is inked up as before (ie, twice) and printed again -

This gives an intense, flat colour.

Next, the bokashi - drops of nori alternating with blobs of paint in a line -

They are mixed with small circular movements of the brush and then stroked along the line. A clean, damp brush is used at the top of the area, to integrate it with the base colour -

My first printing (messy!) -

 and overprinting -

 A second attempt - I liked the bit of "snow" at the top, and the swirly lines. (The dense paint seems to hold the movement of the baren, or brush, or both.) -

Hmm, that deep blue ares isn't quite what I expected with the clean damp brush when doing the bokashi -

Another layer of the blue didn't make much difference -

 Using a wet brush to draw colour from the rest of the block did help, but the bokashi all but disappeared -

Careful inking at the top, though, made for the effect of distance or a light dusting of snow. In reality, the snow pattern on the Golden Ears is quite different. Next week we'll be doing stencils and they could be a way of getting that pattern. 

At the end of the class we marvelled at the workmanship in the woodcuts of Hiroshige  (he was the artist, not responsible for carving or printing) -