Poetry Thursday - Poem Composed in Santa Barbara by Wendy Cope

Poem composed in Santa Barbara

The poets talk. They talk a lot.
They talk of T. S. Eliot.
One is anti. One is pro.
How hard they think! How much they know!
They're happy. A cicada sings.
We women talk of other things.

in Serious Concerns, faber and faber, 2002 (via)


Wendy Cope (b.1945) read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. After university, she worked for 15 years as a primary school teacher. Her first book was published in 1986, at which point she became a freelance writer, and she now lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

The spines of both my books by Wendy Cope have suffered from sunlight damage - the brown of the covers has been bleached to green. Despite the browning of the paper within, the poems are still fresh and mostly lighthearted. I've turned to them several times for contributions to Poetry Thursday.

Woodblock Wednesday - colour, paper, ikat

After last week's struggles with "thick" and "thin" paper, I went to Shepherds and bought five sheets of different japanese papers, then cut a tranche off the ends of each, labelled them, and mixed up some blues ... and did a little printing on Sunday -

first layer, cerulean

add the second layer, prussian blue

the third layer is indigo

Left to right -

Iwami white, 30gsm, 635x940, £8.25 (the least "white" of the papers!)

Shoji 48gsm, 620x920, £2.95

Mingeshi white 48gsm, 640x970mm, £7.00, to be discontinued

Tosa shi 54gsm, 610x910, £4.20

Tosa washi 28gsm, 620x940, £4.20

(prices do not include VAT)

Amid the struggle to "get everything perfect" I hope that something is going right, somewhere! What's going wrong, or rather, what am I so dissatisfied with - is it the colour, or is it the cutting - not enough of the first layer showing? 

Trying to be analytical by looking at some "rough prints"-

Print the second and third layers (at the sides, printed on typing paper)
The second layer alone is in the middle

 The state of the desk as I left the room on Monday...

Using the smaller baren helped. Taking lots of colour samples helped. The japanese papers are interesting to work with. The registration system for the blocks needs improving, as does "messiness" on the print edges.

As for the colours in the photos - they were taken at different times of day, and night.

Next, I'll try doing the layers in various colours rather than shades of blue or grey. Be a little wild, why not?


Now to Wednesday. As this is halfterm at Morley there was no woodblock printing class, but Veronica came and we printed. Her subject is pumpkins, and she's using four layers of colour that mix in some places. I love seeing how she continually improves the print by reassessing the outcomes of each printing session. For me, this extra session was a chance to try out the little ikat blocks.

Printing in progress (tea and chocolate biscuits are essential) -

My results - quite a lot of overprinting, and much time spent working out novel methods of alignment/registration - really, it's easier to do it right first time -

Printing the "round squares" has me thinking of the next step with this block - filling in the middle, perhaps. The double images are prototypes for a "japanese book" with ikat fabric covers, which may or may not happen soon.

At the end of the morning -

Drawing Tuesday - Maritime Museum

My small pencil case contained a gold pencil crayon, and I found something golden to draw - Prince Frederick's barge, designed by William Kent in 1731, with carvings by John Marshall. The dolphins look rather like dragons of the sea -

I was intrigued by the pattern of the scales, both in terms of placement and tone (illicit touching had rubbed off some of the gilding) -

The illustration in the display got the scales -

 ... but I struggled -

Once I'd warmed up with the Golden Porpoise, the front-on drawing took moments and to my eye at least looks more lively.

Jo was on the other side of the barge, drawing the porpoise there -

 Janet B stopped by, on early departure, with Percy the Penguin -

 Mags had been drawing Captain Scott's Antarctic shoes, first in pencil -

 then, concentrating more on the lines, in felt pen -

 Carol was among the figureheads, with those from HMS Ajax and HMS Bulldog -

Sue got involved in the detailed carving of a prow of a model of a Maori war canoe -

 while Janet K found a model of a Solomon Islands topuke outrigger canoe with crab-claw sail -

 as well as other objects from Oceania -

Technique of the week

Jo had been to a class in which the tutor explained about holding a pencil - not as if you were going to write, but thus -

This leads to a very different kind of line, sweeping and curved and tonal. (Try it!)

 Extracurricular activities

Carol felted a pumpkin for her grandson -

Sue recorded the emphemeral colour of "fiery leaves", which disappeared when the leaves curled up quickly -

Mags had been to a Contemporary Quilt workshop led by Helen Parrott, which resulted in a new piece of train stitching, "100 or thereabouts horse chestnuts" -

 ... and also to a workshop with Matthew Harris, which involved painting cardboard and stitching cloth to it (as you do...) -

Julie Cockburn - Telling It Slant

" Using a rich material language, Cockburn embarks on a visual journey to delicately reveal narrative histories and layered meanings in lost and discarded images."

At Flowers, Kingsland Road, till 2 November.

Pushing Paper exhibition

The British Museum's free exhibition of contemporary drawings (since 1970) is on till 12 January, after which it will tour to The Oriental Museum in Durham, the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea and the Cooper Gallery in Barnsley.

I've seen only half, because of "reading everything" and taking notes and looking hard and going round twice, and will go back soon to see the rest. A catalogue is available, apparently!

Here are some of those I found most interesting. (Click on the images to read the writing.) The lines are due to the (strobe?!) lighting in the room. Go see it in person if you can. 

Susan Schwalb

Imran Qureshi

Minjung Kim

Philip Guston

Adel Daoud

Judy Chicago

Kenneth Martin

Overview (perhaps "overglimpse" is more accurate) - with drawings by Bridget Riley, Anish Kapoor, Kenneth Martin, Minjung Kim -

Woodblock Wednesday - printing problems continue...

Trying again, in class and with advice/guidance, to get even colour on the "water" piece. In the meantime I started a new project based on "ikat" but haven't printed yet - lots of rubbings though -

First step in figuring out what was going wrong was to get some colours that were distinguishable, so I tried out all the blues available and settled on cerulean (pale), prussian, and indigo

Again, it wasn't making an even print

The situation improved with re-inking and overprinting -

On thin paper, there was a little misalignment at one point but all colours got printed -

Thick (hosho) paper on the left, thin (chinese roll) on the right. OK it looks like water but not in the way I expected!

Next I'll try printing with very different colours (eg grey, blue, black or even a metallic gouache for the bottom layer) to be able to see where some cutting back of the middle block would help, ie show more of the first layer. Careful registration. Using a smaller baren. Washing boards and brushes between colours. The usual questions - too wet or too dry? Too much nori or not enough?

Maybe the paper is wrong. Time to buy some good stuff...

Something different - pasting the hanshita onto the block - using a print of the keyblock instead of tracing the image with carbon paper -