Berlin, June 2015

Clearing out some emails - apparently 14.4GB of the allotted 15GB is used. How many emails make a GB? 

June 2015, our month in Berlin, on a house exchange. Here is Tony sitting in the vast flat. The weather turned cold, and the heating for the building had been turned off weeks or perhaps months ago.

A few days later I wrote to a friend:

"While the washing is finishing (55 mins to go) Tony is working on his current filming project and I'll be choosing a few photos to add to the blog. We had a good excursion yesterday afternoon, to the Gemaldegalerie - an hour in the company of medieval paintings, which I love, "religious" content notwithstanding. The gold leaf and the rich colours, 700 years on, shine through time. You can't help but think about the people who made them, and those who looked at them. And I love how they're often panels of an altarpiece that were folded up most of the time and then opened at special times ... like books?? ... in fact they were "books" for illiterate people, like the memory sticks I saw at the Dahlem [ethnographic] museum on Tuesday, not with writing as such but with meaningful marks to prod the memory."

During the time in Berlin I continued with Drawing Tuesday and filled a sketchbook at various museums, while Tony sat at the big table in the cold flat and worked on his filming project, wrapped in blankets.

More rumblings around the home studio aka store room

The hunt for the box of safety pins continued, and some "interesting" things turned up. From a bag of woollens that had been in the freezer for moth treatment, and been forgotten for half a year, the gloves on the right...

 an earlier version of those I bought a month ago, without the fuzzyness inside (and pilling outside) -

Both have "electronic" fingertips - I didn't know that the earlier pair did! - and I hadn't rememered buying it....

Also from a moth-damage-prevention bag, and how on earth could I have forgotten this, my fave boiled-wool jacket with my fave silver pin on it. I wore that jacket all last winter, or (oh dear) was it the winter before...

 And then, a 6th drawing-tuesday sketchbook. I was pleased to have four, then a fifth turned up, and now there are six full sketchbooks, one day a week over four years -

The numbering system needs revising. Dates would be helpful - remember to put the year when you date your work!

Norfolk memories

Helen's chicken collection, and her actual chickens, c.2010 - they would wander into the kitchen, given half a chance -

We went for a walk on the coast and saw - and smelled! - walruses on the beach, and I'm sure I took photos of them, but they're not in the same file ...

The sky is reflected in the water, as you might expect,

but also...

... the water reflects the sky, in this accidental juxtaposition

Why these, now? I'm trawling through photo files, in the never-ending quest for some sort of organisation of images ... and coincidentally, Helen has come to London (minus chickens).

A turnup for the books

While sorting out the books to go on (in?) the new bookshelves, I came across interesting things (but did not stop to read them at length!). That came later...

1. Catalogue of summer courses at City Lit. I signed up for a two-day sketchbook course, and a geology course over four sessions. 

2. "About Looking" by John Berger, opened at random, yielded this, at the very end of a section:

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of the line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. 

It goes on - as it's in an essay called "Uses of Photography" (1978):

Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they mst mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it mau be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, olitical, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.

3. And then there's the A4 notebook bought in Hungary and used as a workbook for The Artist's Way. When I started working through that book, I was not a happy bunny about "my creativity" and the time spent being creative and especially about the life factors that were keeping me from producing creative output.

 It starts with affirmations, then there's a summary, in five-year periods, of "my creative life". The date is 1998, and in the past five years I'd been focusing on textiles, attending many courses at City Lit, especially with Julia Caprara, and was exhibiting with Cloth&Stitch. Plus was doing some illustration courses.

The section that starts "where does my time go" eventually discovers: "Didn't answer the question - andswered "how do I use my time". ... Much goes in sitting & thinking - much. Or lying in bed & thinking. Or in the bath. I like thinking. I also like doing. It's getting from one to the other that's the problem."

Another exercise was to list the "things I enjoy doing" -

Not much has changed! I've given up "struggling with piano", though it was fun while it lasted (and a piano plus teach-yourself books would be my desert island luxury).

The "three obvious rotten habits" [what are yours...] and "three subtle foes" were interesting, and I think that writing them down and thinking about them has made a difference. Of course an important part of The Artist's Way is the "morning pages" - which I continued doing for years, having at first found the exercise "trivial, repetitive, boring" - and that was all about writing down but with a different emphasis: once it was written down, it was no longer buzzing round in your head. So at first you can offload all the negative stuff, then later you start to focus on the positive stuff. Eventually "on the page" was where I discussed my latest wild ideas with myself ... strange how the ideas that led to finished work were never those that I'd written about!

The letters to oneself, from oneself aged 80 and 8, are so interesting. I can't bear to go on reading them, they are so true to what's changed over the past two decades...

"10 items I would like to own" [what are your 10?] - I now do own a "comfortable vegetable peeler" but am still looking for the "fabulous all-purpose shoes" and probably never will find the "magic carpet (with time machine as optional extra)" ... alas ...

A section on money. The week of writing down everything you spent was so, so useful to me. And what I wrote about family attitudes about money is revealing: "In my family, money caused worry". Those were tough times, and many families are going through the same worry now. Some of us are so lucky to be able to avoid that ... by good luck.

"As a kid..." ... what did you miss, lack, could have used help with, dream of, want? (separate answers to each of these, please!)

The workbook stops with this page - a summary of the nice things about the past week -

I'll have to keep my eyes open for "small victories" ... perhaps one such would be doing those things not done during the day about which you say to yourself, "it doesn't matter". Turning thoughts into action, however inconsequential it might seem.

Half of this workbook is empty. I know I worked right through The Artist's Way ... but I no longer have that book, so can't check what the exercises in the last chapter were. Maybe some got left out? I remember being very uncomfortable with the "spirituality" ones, but didn't shirk that chapter.

It seems entirely appropriate to revisit the Artists-Way experience, and I've shared only the bits that don't make me cringe or yawn. (There is much more....) Thanks for reading - and if you decide to write those letters to your younger or older self, keep them safe and re-read them in 10 or 20 years.

Rediscoveries

Experiments in mixing shades of blue and yellow

The peg dolls that Clea made when she was a child

These 1981 beauties have been at the back of the cupboard forever 

Various papers, made into "boats" for the Journeys exhibition in 2010,
that never did get reused

Book projects from earlier in the decade

Thumbnails used for deciding which of Tony's photos to show, June 2016

The treadle got a little dusty, but still works

Wool bought in Wales in 2008 - the jumper never finished

This is the weekend of our House Clearance event. Having packed up what we'll be keeping ourselves, all week Clea and I have been frantically sifting and sorting, putting out the remaining books, dvds, crockery, pictures, furniture,whatever.  It's not a sale - we are simply hoping people will come and take things away - donations toward a memorial bench are welcome but hardly obligatory.

Almost ready -

Clearing Tony's office took Clea much longer than she thought - what a lot of things we accumulate without even knowing it! -

Back at the flat, surfaces have been cleared to receive the sewing machine and all the rest -

And then there will be a further round of sorting, sifting, removal. All in good time.

Little things, gone

Thin book of Ian McKeever's prints

Empty - but beautiful - soap wrappers

Crumbling leaves printed in 2011, broken porcelain printed in 2014

My "journey" installation, 2010 ... it's had its moment and must move on

Sorting ... postcards

When the box fell off a shelf, it was a signal. These arty postcards, avidly collected in the early 90s, when I started doing art and textile courses, needed to be moved on. They'll be going to a charity that does art therapy with children, The Art Room.

Some of the cards had fallen out, and seeing the writing on the back I started going through and taking these "personal" ones out. Wonderful to see the different handwritings, each conjuring up the sender. (I also found quite a few that I'd written but hadn't sent.) All to be kept for future perusal.

The cards had been filed by category -

"Feet" contained just five cards -

(click on image to enlarge)

I took out a few "interesting" cards to keep, and some "series" to photograph, just for the memory.

Also I finally went through years of accumulated Christmas cards - why keep them bundled up if you never look at them? A photo will serve as well -

Reading about John Berger

At the top of the piles of books are those I want to read soon - they get shifted up as more books are added to the heap - 

About Looking (1980) is not, of course, his memorable tv series Ways of Seeing (1972), but it will be worth another look.

The memories published in the Guardian included a couple of paragraphs that struck a chord with me. Geoff Dyer wrote:

he was reliant, to the end, on his art school discipline of drawing. If he looked long and hard enough at anything it would either yield its secrets or, failing that, enable him to articulate why the withheld mystery constituted its essence. This holds true not just for the writings on art but also the documentary studies (of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man and of migrant labour in A Seventh Man), the novels, the peasant trilogy Into Their Labours, and the numerous books that refuse categorisation. Whatever their form or subject the books are jam-packed with observations so precise and delicate that they double as ideas – and vice versa. “The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art,” he writes in “The Moment of Cubism”. In Here Is Where We Meet he imagines “travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third – the name of your horse.”

Olivia Laing wrote:

His essays on painting are packed with unforgettable images, the diligent, inspired seeing of an artist who’d given himself over to written language. Vermeer’s rooms, “which the light fills like water in a tank”. Goya, whose cross-hatched tones gave “a human body the filthy implication of fur”. Bonnard’s “dissolving colours, making his subjects unattainable, nostalgic”. Pollock’s “great walls of silver, pink, new gold, pale blue nebulae seen through dense skeins of swift dark or light lines”. Art criticism is rarely this plain, this fruitful, or this adamant that what happens on a canvas has a bearing on our human lives.

I also liked the idea of "reapprehending possibilities". Whatever that actually means, it sounds fruitful...

His readers are the inheritors, across all the decades of his work, of a legacy that will always reapprehend the possibilities. 

Berger at home in Paris in 1999 (via)

Ali Smith said that without him, we must continue to pay "creative attention", and  his friend Simon McBurney wrote:

He was never not listening.

Pink stapler

A coincidence - coming across the pink stapler when clearing up, and then, looking back on my blog, coming across the stapler in 2009 -

Perhaps I fixed it? Has anyone used it since 2009?

Sure do wish I could find those little bits of sewing - there were many, and they were fun to do, varying the stitch marks. Often I would base them on the rhythm of overheard conversations or phone calls. Perhaps they were mounted on paper and submitted as project work during the foundation course? Somewhere there is a portfolio with quite a few pieces from the foundation course. (It will no doubt emerge as the studio clearing continues.)

Then again, it would be easy enough to find snippets of silk and stitch them to snippets of black wool. Could they become "chimneypot" ceramics ....

Playing paper dolls

While researching the concept of Ladies Drawing Night* I came across this image

which filled my head with memories of "playing paper dolls" in the 1950s. What a treat to have a new book of paper dolls and cut out the clothes, with the little tabs that held them onto the doll. Usually the doll was on heavy, shiny paper, and had a slotted stand so she (or he) could stand up. There might be several in the book, the shape the same so the clothes were interchangeable, but with different hair colour etc.

One summer - I was 7 or 8 - the family set off on holiday to "the interior", probably a weekend at Shushwap Lake. At a stop along the way (it was a six-hour drive in those days), the store we stopped at had a book of paper dolls and I pestered my parents till they gave in and bought it ... only to find that we hadn't brought scissors along. Fortunately there were nail scissors in mother's handbag, and I had to make do with those, which rather took away the pleasure of cutting out. I prided myself on my good cutting out, and wanted to get the entire book cut out immediately [how early are our characters formed...] but didn't really get the hang of making the tiny snips needed, didn't like the look of the results, and the earnestly-desired, disappointing book languished.

That was a holiday treat and family finances didn't stretch to all the paper doll books I ever desired, nor was there much selection in the stores that a child living in the country could get to. So we made our own paper dolls, using the underwear models in the Sears or Eatons catalogues as the doll

Perfect for a paper doll (1955; via)

cutting a half-circle at the base, and another from cardboard, for the slotted stand. It was wise to glue the page to cardboard before doing the cutting out, to get sleekly-finished edges.

Then we traced around the outline and used that to design costumes for her. Or him ... though I did find men in underwear deeply unappealing, and why would men need "designed" clothes anyway?

Anyway, they never had legs (via)

Finding full-length children could be difficult. Sometimes you had to resign yourself to making all the clothing in the shape the "doll" was wearing in the catalogue -

Use the one at bottom row right (via)

Ah, nostalgia...

Mother and daughter outfits! (via)

Wardrobes for a variety of activities (via)

*Other sites for Ladies Drawing Night (thanks, Tina!)

http://www.leahgoren.com/ldn/

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/ladiesdrawingnight/?hl=en

http://samanthahahn.com/blog/2015/03/05/ladies-drawing-night/

Wordless Wednesday

What's all this then?

"Then" is when it was made - at least 20 years ago, as one of those exercises that help us get clarity on our life goals, or put things in perspective, or remind ourselves of what we'd like to get out of life.

How you do it is - take half a dozen magazines of various titles, and look through them for photos that appeal to you and tear out those pages. (You may want to discard the rest of the magazine immediately, lest it haunt your life as clutter.) Then glue "your" photos onto a big sheet of paper.

I found the exercise very ... clarifying. It brought what was important to me at the time, and what remains important to me now, though some small details have changed - the comfortable shoes now need to be somewhat stylish (and accommodate bunions - totally incompatible aims perhaps, but the search goes on), and that little black dress ... 20 years later and 20 lbs lighter, I'd rather wear little black jeans!

The minimal, hospitable rooms speak to an ongoing aspiration, but at the time had a deeper meaning - I was living in a shabby shared house and not happy with the situation, yet felt I was stuck there and could never afford my own place. But sometimes circumstances change; I don't remember exactly what happened, but being mugged outside my own gate certainly had something to do with it, and after a bit of hard negotiation I was out of there, moving 5 minutes down the road and into a very different life.

The dream-spaces are two dining rooms, or maybe three, at least one with a french door into the garden; a bathroom (with art on the wall!); and an airy library-gallery. Not to overlook the summerhouse/shed/studio in the garden.

Ah, garden ... flowering plants, and trees ... there are many in my dream-life. On the left is a paved courtyard garden with luscious clusters in great variety planted among the stones - a model for my own paved area out front, which is almost ready to plant (some dreams come true, but probably not quite as you imagined them).

Art supplies; birds; a fireplace. Keeping busy; observing nature; being warm.

Scenery - the sun breaking through clouds over gentle hills and long-cultivated valleys, how very English. The gloomier road beside the sea, and a snow scene elsewhere - these are about living in a place with seasons, and enjoying those seasons in their changeableness.

There's a painting of a family scene, but nothing about the importance of friends - that was an interesting omission but would definitely be there now. Maybe the fireworks - an explosion of joy - represent friendships and relationships?

To go with the many dining rooms, there are cakes. Cakes aren't quite so important to me now, but remain an important link with the past and my mother's effortless master-baker shining example, and her generous hospitality.

Last but not least - coffee, and an elegant coffee maker.