Recent geometry

Practising painting (watercolours). Choosing colours can be difficult; currently I seem to be want to use blues, so many different shades...

(Needs a bit of red, I think)

Building up a stock of greetings cards.

Seen, enjoyed, photographed, noted

Display of postcards from the printmaking department's postcard exchange at Morley Collete

... including one of mine

my favourite

The kinetic work of Takis at Tate Modern - most of my pix are videos and I've never figured out how to put videos on blogger

 Also at Tate Modern, Olafur Eliasson's retrospective (till 5 January 2020) includes things, maquettes, light, liquids, fog... ideas, ideas, ideas -

Selfie in the fog - the fog was yellow, the camera lies!

 At Bankside Gallery,  wonderful watercolours in "The Art of Travel" (till 9 November) -

Gertie Young

Anne Lynch

 At Japan House, lovely exhibition of the illustrations of Anno Mitsumata, which made excellent use of scaled-up versions of his papercuts for window display (till 27 Oct) -

 At National Portrait Gallery, drawings by Elizabeth Eyton (till 5 January) -

 Society of Graphic Fine Art at Menier Gallery (till 2 November) -

 Antony Gormley at the RA - good to see his varied early work -

Land Sea and Air (lead cases for stone, water, air)

In the RA magazine he said that the work started on an excursion with his brother:

Other favourites -

Blanket Drawing - drawn with clay - handle with care

A lead bowl. A bowl full of lead. Heavy.

"Grasp" - altered stone

 Love the simplicity of the drawings -

 ... and the multiplicity of the notebooks (four vitrines) -

Channelling Gillian Ayres

Seeing Gillian Ayres' prints show at Alan Cristea (till 11 May, online here), with the bright clear colours,  provided a welcome contrast to the dull brown woodcut printing that morning. A couple of details -

Having made lithography and screenprints, she mor recently made monoprints and walnut veneered woodblocks - fitting up to 20 or so colours on two blocks, which were often cut into shapes to fit together like a jigsaw -

I revelled in the colours and shapes, and thought back to using a magazine cut-out of one of her prints for choosing the next colour in "the stripey painting".

This one in a book really grabbed me, and I speculated about how to do something similar in woodcut; after all, I have some bits of wood just the right shape -

So at home I drew and painted a version from memory -

 and doodled a bit, finding other possible colourways -

then looked carefully at the photo and came up with another version, which had to fit onto the width of my paper -

The blue background is the wrong shade - I wanted the colour provided by the crayon and in the bottom right -

It's been tweaked a bit, and white paint added ... still not right; compare with the original and you'll think "all wrong" - !

Gillian Ayres, Mazy Sands all Water-Wattled (2014)

... alas for my kak-handed adaptations, misperceptions, and lack of colour and tonal balance, not to mention the glaring compositional clunkers.

Copying is (a) not easy and (b) very instructive! Also, it should not be rushed.

One thing leads to another

Before

After

Sometime during the making of this panel (in a class at Camden Arts Centre) I remembered the big reel of rick-rack that came from a charity shop a year or two ago, and this morning I finally added some here & there, using white paint both to cover the painted red lines and to glue on the trim - two birds with one stone.

From an angle you can see that some areas are shiny (acrylic) and some are matte (gesso), without rhyme or reason, so work on this hasn't finished yet.

While refilling my coffee cup I noticed the pattern on the teatowel that's used to help keep the coffee jug warm -

 ... and drew out some ideas for stitching on pots -

 Two versions are on the way, the hexagon graph paper supported by sinamay -

It's an experiment - how will the clay interact with the paper layer?