Where has all the stitching gone, long time passing

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary, time to ponder where my stitching has got to.  I’m being diverted in to sketchbook work, which is a good thing, in light of the degree of mental block I have about thinking my scribblings are worthy of the word sketchbook.

Work in the studio at Mary Ward, continuing with this piece, cutting a stencil to allow multiples to be drawn on top of each other

Then as ever, I felt the need for some collage

One more week to work on this in the studio.

I am still working on the CQGB monthly challenge. with the last one of the seed series well underway. Applique, embroidery and texturing with TextureMagic

Shadowing with oilsticks has been overdone, I’ll need to see if I can tone that down.

The final three in the series are based on bacteria, and the threats posed by overuse of antibiotics.

I’ve filled a sketchbook,, so needed a new one. Breakdown-printed cloth with an appliquéd piece of melted ( deliberately of course!) gold lame fabric. 

Filling up

 

Experiments with drawing ink and an angle-cut hair dyeing brush on pasted tissue paper - swans, gondolas?

Inspiration this month has come from: Ruth Padel and  Issam Kourbaj, “Dark Water, Burning  World” a small installation in the Islamic Gallery at the British Museum; The Business of Prints at the British Museum; Prism at Hoxton Galleries, now finished, particularly the work of Ross Belton using found natural materials.

Finishing on using found natural materials, a note on Margaret Cooter’s blog, inspired me to search out this beautiful method of making decorative roses from autumn leaves.

Back to drawing

It is lovely to be back at the Mary Ward Centre to draw with the inspirational Abigail Downer.  The first exercise is to consider two objects, a natural one and a manmade one, as “actors” in a composition.  My objects are a vase and a gourd, 

Many exercises later, I have a drawing of the vase,  a little lopsided, but a good start.

While studying the structures together, I was struck how overlapping multiple images of the vase mimicked the folds and rolls of the gourd.  That is what I am exploring next,

How long is a generation?

I have been pondering this question for a few weeks as I see publicity for revivals of three theatrical / dance productions that I saw in 1982, 1990 and 1992 respectively. Two of these have been publicised as “ not seen on stage in the UK for a generation”.

All three of these stand out in my mind after all this time for different reasons, and it seems important to me to embrace these works again as we are in such troubled times as a species sharing this planet.

So I would encourage anyone reading this to go and see:

"Ghost Dances’ by Christopher Bruce, performed by Ballet Rambert, touring and at Sadler’s Wells, London. A first exposure for me to contemporary dance when I saw it in 1982 and a  production that has stayed with me -  for 34 years: music, movement, costumes all superb - tickets booked.

“ The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus” by Tony Harrison at the Finborough Theatre, London, on until 28th January.  This was my first exposure to performed verse in 1990 and I have never forgotten the experience. Brilliantly updated, and in this 50 seat setting, an intimate encounter with very physical theatre.

“Angels in America” by Tony Kushner at the National Theatre, London. Such a moving, but occasionally baffling, pair of plays when I saw them in 1992. They were staged in the Cottesloe, which then seated around 350 people. The new production will be in the Littleton, seating 890 people, therefore presumably all to be done on a much larger scale. It will be fascinating to see how well this play translates to 2016, particularly as it starts in April, 3 months after the start of Trump’s term of office.  The National box office have already warned that these tickets will sell out quickly.

And the drawing? Yes it continues:

Feather from the “nature table” that seemed to have been attacked by some sort of mite, leaving a big gap along the shaft. Pencil and ink pen.

Serendipitous charcoal rubbing of the back of a section of last week’s collage of vases and jugs made me rub over the whole lot. Charcoal.

Corn cob and husk, pencil and charcoal. I could not get my eye in for this at all. Too much going on , so I then focused on a tiny bit of one of the husks.

Tip of a corn cob husk. Pencil. I was very pleased when I “saw” the hole in the husk and the light falling through that in to the cast shadow.

Paint can, pencil. Two in one day as I knew it would be difficult to fit in drawing time the day after.

Waiting for a break in the rain, to run to the Finborough Theatre. The reflective tray was very difficult. Pencil.

And the sewing? There is another shirt underway - yes for my younger son, he hates boring clothes.

Perfect placket, thanks to Off the Cuff.

Cuffs with contrast inside fabric - amazing what I find in the fabric stash.

Drawing and domesticity

The art tutor took us to see a free exhibition of work, mostly drawings, by Maggi Hambling at the British Museum, called ‘Touch’. Maggi Hambling divides opinion, but I like a lot of her work particularly the Scallop sculpture. The exhibition is on until 29 January 2017.
Photography is allowed.  The intent of the visit was for us to study Hambling’s mark making and to study, through copying, those marks. As some of the work was mono printing, that was difficult to do, however just looking at the range of marks on the print of this figure was inspiring.

There are some very touching drawings of her friends and family close to death.

My own attempt at that figure, head and hand. Nowhere near, but closer than I was 2 years ago.

The next week, a replacement tutor catapulted us in to portraiture -aaarrrggghhh!. After I calmed myself down, I’m pleased with this ( A2 size, charcoal and chalk on a coloured paper), as it is recognisable as the sitter, though he said I had made him look much younger.

Stitching for the past few weeks has been very domestic.
Replacement curtains and cushions for the bedroom to replace the “temporary” curtains and cushions that had been put in 22 years ago. After 21 years of family life, including the dog choosing one of the cushions as his favoured favoured window-viewing spot, they finally had to go.
The pattern matching along the front of the past of cushions took much measuring and swearing to get correct.



Inherited Ercol chairs have arrive in our house ( let’s say that ours have more of the patina of age about them). Their cushions were also in a sorry state, so while my piping skills were honed by the 30 degree corners on the bedroom cushions, I could tackle four replacements for these. Not in the original style, but a lot more comfortable.

The swan has also been finished. Faced rather than bound and waiting for the right wall space to show it to advantage.

Shell drawing

Three weeks in to the new term of the drawing course, and we have had the challenge to choose an object, divide our paper in to 4 sections ( whichever way we wished, but with straight lines only) and then draw our object using only line in one part, only tone in another, texture in the next and form in the last section.  We could use any medium we wished, wet or dry, but the drawing had to be very large, on at least A1 size paper.

I chose a shell, blurry photo below

and the result is

Furthermost left was line, the top section was tone, the middle was texture and the lower right part was form.  I got totally confused with form until I eventually realised that this had to be a combination of line and tone.  i used 4 grades of pencil, and about 5 different sticks of charcoal, both willow and compressed.

I can see now how my brain deceived my eye in drawing the inner curves of the shell  - drawn curving to the right at the topped, when they are clearly curving to the left. I need to write out the tutor’s mantras and recite them to myself at the beginning of each class:

- draw what you see, not what you know

- the light is your friend

- note down the light direction

- your object is sitting on something - what is it?

- a rubber is as important as a pencil or charcoal

Off to sharpen my pencils!

Return to drawing

With all that difficulty in discerning positive and negative space in my last post, it is just as well that I have returned to a drawing course at the Mary Ward Centre.  As ever, one of my personal learning objectives is " to draw every day".  In that spirit, here are this week's efforts.

Fish vertebra

Shoes and shapes

Cow parsley stalks

It is so infuriating that I can't rotate these photos.

Return to drawing

I am back at the Mary Ward Centre this term, for a mix of drawing and painting.  This session was a refresher on measuring size and proportion of objects and transferring them to paper using the sight size method.  Our tutor, Sophie, encouraged us to use a bamboo skewer as a measuring tool, and  certainly found this much more consistent than using a pencil.  We chose a series of objects, gradually increasing in complexity.  I did enjoy this when I got to the "flow" stage.

Looking at these boards in the studio, I ca see why I was completely take in by the work of this artist  at the Mall Galleries earlier this year.

Drawing the simplest shapes seems to be the hardest thing

I have a very simple, favourite cuff bracelet.  As I am trying to draw more often, that cuff was a subject earlier this week.  Very difficult, but the attempt at lower left does seem to be getting towards the shape ( drawn on top of an upturned plate to ry to get some sense of scale in to the drawing).  Tartan covers out for Burns night this weekend.

I used the "skew correction " function on my camera to try to straighten out this image, and it really distorted the cuff.  Interesting.

Last Morley session, still life composition and drawing with tone

The end of my second term of drawing instruction, and I can now pick up a 2B pencil without hyperventilating.  These classes have only increased my retrospective disappointment at the standard of art teaching at my senior school.  ( At the time, I just sat there, baffled by the whole idea of getting something representative down on paper). 

This session was in two parts, the first on composition, using cut out shapes in two shades of paper to analyse pleasing and discordant placement of these shapes.

We then took some objects from around the studio, placed them in an interesting composition, and  then drew them, using only tone.  The result is below, A4 size.  Apart from  a couple of wonky lines, this is light years away from where I started this course.  Thank you Steve.