Drawing

April 10, 2016

Last weekend I set aside some time for drawing. None of these drawings are for their own sake but a way of testing ideas and I had some specific things I wanted to try. The results were mixed and I have some conflicted feelings about them.

First I did a series of ink drawings where the focus was on exploring layers of ink wash. I had not planned that they would turn into a series of “mountain-scapes” but they did. The first was simply an intuitive response to what I was doing at that moment, but then with the next few it became progressively more deliberate … and I became progressively more dissatisfied. I’ve been pondering the reasons for this dissatisfaction.

What I don’t like is that the drawings became more explicit, more literal as I went on – too much so for my taste. They are unequivocally mountain-scapes, leaving no room for alternative interpretation. Yes, they are atmospheric and “pretty” … but in a way I find rather predictable – even trite. They encourage a superficial response. The ones I like best are the simplest and also the more ambiguous.

Piling up drawings - some of the accidental combinations were far more interesting than the individual drawings

It’s as though I had followed a path that, while perfectly pleasant, was not leading me somewhere that I wanted to go. Although I sort of recognised this at the time, it was hard to change direction rather than continue to follow the track I was on. Once my initial crossness with the drawings had passed, over the ensuing days I started to think of ways I could take the method I had been using and push it in a different direction.

The second set of drawings was something I’ve had in mind for a while. They are based on photographs of recently cut hedgerows and inspired in part by Brice Marden’s Shell Drawings. I was interested in developing the calligraphic qualities of the twig shapes.

Hedge drawings - Indian ink, ink wash, charcoal

Curiously I didn’t enjoy the process of making these drawings that much, although I forced myself to do enough of them to expose a reasonable range of options. I do like the results better. The challenge here is how to develop them further. Initially it felt like a dead end – how on earth could I use these? Their monochrome character, which is part of their appeal, is problematic with dye. But gradually I have been identifying some ways forward.

If I had written this post last weekend it would have been a stream of irritation. It’s lovely when I do something and it just works, but there are lots of times when they don’t. Sometimes I need to allow some time to pass before I can see where to go next. And sometimes I have to recognise when I’m going the wrong way and need to retrace my steps.

Working

January 17, 2016

In early December I planned out all the work I needed to do. An exhibition in February means work has to be ready for framing … around now actually. It was all perfectly possible on paper. But it’s one thing to block out time on a plan and write “stitch work”, for example, and quite another to actually do it. In the studio I surveyed the pile of work I needed to finish and felt slightly terrified.

A deadline is a wonderful thing for getting focused. I dropped or deferred everything that did not contribute to getting the work done (including this blog) and settled down to work. Apart from a couple of days with my family, I stitched all the way through Christmas.

It goes something like this. I pull out each piece of work and lay it on my studio table. In this case I had already stitched them all to a backing fabric. Canvas this time (I had my reasons but never again – my poor fingers). I lay out different threads on top of the work until I have a palette I want to work with. Silk, rayon, cotton – some matte, some shiny. Mostly very fine in weight. I look at the piece of work for a clue as to what to do and where to start.

Mostly I work with the marks on the cloth, sometimes I work against them or look to add marks where there are none. I will have an idea what I want but not usually a plan for the whole piece when I start. I will know where I want the emphasis to be but otherwise I will ask myself as I am working what the piece needs.

Occasionally there is a piece where I don’t know what to do. When there is a type of mark I haven’t worked with before. Or the marks in the cloth are so subtle that I am really not sure what to add – or whether to add anything at all. In this case I just try something. If it doesn’t work, I pull out the stitches and try something else. Change thread. Larger stitches. Smaller ones. A different kind of mark. Dense layers of marks – or sparse and widely spaced. I take photographs – sometimes it’s clearer what you need to do when you look at an image of it.

For two weeks I worked like this for six to ten hours a day. I listened to music or radio documentaries. Sometimes I worked in silence. If this sounds relaxing, I can’t say that it was. There was a tension between the slow, patient hand work and the underlying sense of pressure to get everything done. This was a consequence of working to a tight schedule, not the experience of slow stitch. And there wasn’t time to play around or experiment too much.

As I worked, ideas came to me – things I want to try. Not just stitch ideas. I jotted them down in my sketchbook so as not to lose them and kept working. I was mildly frustrated that I couldn’t afford the time to stop and do other things. Which made me ponder the value of both work and play. I remembered how earlier in the year I was frustrated that I didn't know what to do and was not “working” and used play and experimentation to keep myself going. The work I am doing now derived from that period.

Anyway I am now preparing a pile of finished work for the framer. I have some admin things to do but otherwise I will soon be through this phase of work. Then I am going to do something else for a while.

Exhibition details:

I will be showing some of this new work in an exhibition alongside paintings by Stephanie Stow and Elaine Cox at Bircham Gallery in Holt, Norfolk from Saturday 13 February until 9 March.

I also currently have some work in a mixed show at The Bank in Eye, Suffolk. The exhibition, Abstraction of Form, runs from Tuesday 19 January until 28 February.

A daily practice - part four

August 14, 2015

In the studio, I am still stitching. I took some finished pieces to the framers this morning and am now finishing off some smaller ones that I think I will show unframed. This is all for the exhibition with Clive Barnett at Art Van Go that starts 2 September. I've pinned everything up on the studio wall to decide what goes in ... and what doesn't - and to choose titles for the ones still unnamed. It is all hard work - and there's lots of associated admin, none of which makes for a particularly interesting blog post.

However, I have not shared the details of the last round of mark-making / drawing, so ...

This was the fourth round of forty days of daily mark-making. In fact it was forty-two days and finished at the end of July. I've only just got round to sorting through the photos. This time I had decided it would be interesting to work on loose sheets of paper, which is what I would normally prefer to do anyway. But, having worked in a sketchbook for the previous 120 days plus, I found it surprisingly difficult to get going. Despite the increased freedom, for the first week or so I could only manage my minimum one page a day.

There's something about working in these blocs of forty days - each develops its own rhythm or character. And each time, there's been a period of adjustment at the beginning - uncertainty about what to do, having to find new strategies for working. And at the end, I have sometimes felt that it was becoming predictable, routine, that I was just repeating myself. It's curious and I wonder whether it would be the same if I had committed to a continuous practice rather than a time-limited one.

I value activities that put me in a position where I don't quite know what I'm doing. So this period of adjustment each time is not a bad thing in my view. The difficulty is a sign that I'm having to find my way and learn something afresh. I actually prefer this to feeling that it is too easy, automatic and I am not having to think.

The value of this practice (for me, I don't know about others) is the engagement with the process and the materials. This is more important than the quality of whatever results. I think what I'm looking for is the development: changes in the kind of marks, the ways of organising them, finding different methods for making them, effects I haven't seen before.

So, what happened in the end, once I got through this awkward adjustment phase, was that I found myself alternating between two contrasting strategies. The first was that I took full advantage of the loose sheet to manipulate the page: folding, crumpling, rubbing, scratching and piercing the surface. It was more of a collage approach - and sometimes I layered two pages together, making holes in one so you could see through to the next. It was quite intensive and I usually worked on no more than two pages at a time or even worked into a page over two days.

The second strategy was to do a series of ten (or more) pages, working quite quickly with the same media (mostly ink) and a similar theme. This led to series of very similar looking pages but I found it very informative. It was an excellent way of trying different combinations or layers of marks - variations on a theme.

Since the end of this fourth round, I have accidentally taken a break. Accidentally, because I didn't actually decide to do so in advance. The immediate cause was first, that I went away for a few days; second, that I hadn't prepared either paper or sketchbook for the next round, which just proves how important it is to do this if I want to keep going, in my case at least. The secondary cause is that I'm in two minds what to do next with this. I do feel that my mark-making is becoming a little too repetitive for my taste. I could just carry on and work with that, keep pushing things on until there's a breakthrough. But I'm also thinking it might be valuable to spend some time on more observational drawing to train myself to make new marks / combinations of marks. But then that would be a decisive shift towards drawing rather than mark-making ...

So, while I'm working on finishing the final pieces for exhibition, I'm allowing myself a break to figure out which approach would serve me best. ... And if I fail to make up my mind, I shall just start anyway and see what happens ... once this exhibition is up and running that is.

Resistance

June 21, 2015

Quite a lot of "resistance" - in Steven Pressfield terms - this past week. I have struggled to get into the studio and get going ... even though I had eleven screens ready to print. And then when I did start, I managed to make preparing cloth and mixing dye last a whole day!

I think in part this is a perverse response to the fact that things have been going well. I like the samples I've already printed so much as they are ... and yet I know they need something more. So there's been a subconscious reluctance to "meddle" with the process and just keep doing more of the same - play "safe" ... maybe just change scale.

The other factor I think is that this is quite a change in my process. Preparing and printing the screens involves making different kinds of decisions. And at an earlier stage in the process of producing cloth. I'm having to adjust to this.

And yet another factor is that I am unsure how I am going to work with these pieces. I love what's happening and know that this is a direction I want to pursue ... but I have no idea at this point how I will turn these into finished work. (And, yes, I do know I don't need to have the answers to that yet!)

I always draw comfort from Pressfield's assertion that if you're feeling resistance to doing something, you're getting somewhere. And the only useful response is to get back to work. I got my act together and printed over half the screens. I experimented with different kinds of cloth and started to bring in more colour and layer marks. The one above was printed on muslin with a plain cotton underneath. Well, it had to be tried but this was not one of the more successful, or most interesting, trials. I want to evaluate the results before I print the remaining screens, but it's looking promising. One thing that has helped has been to bring in elements from previous work. It's helping me to find my way in.

Not many images with this post. I'm wary of sharing too much when my ideas are at such a fragile stage. This is actually a good sign - it means I think I'm making progress.

Sketchbook

April 28, 2015

I still have work to finish but in between I've been working in this sketchbook. I normally prefer to work on loose sheets of paper but I thought it would be interesting to work into a book for a change. So far I am finding it more restrictive but on the other hand I like seeing the lines of thought emerging.

The pages below are from last week. I'm just trying things out. Testing ideas, ways of looking at things. I've been working from photographs of estuaries and marshes, making quick drawings and collages. Then cropping some of these, or turning them round, to look at them in different ways.

I've also been playing with words. This helps me to find connections and associations that I don't necessarily get from the drawings.

I always have several sketchbooks or notebooks on the go. The two main ones are my journal, in which I reflect on things I've done, seen, read, heard. The other is my studio sketchbook, which contains technical notes, sketches and photos of work in progress, random ideas to try, dye calculations, lists and plans. These two are my working books. They are not pretty but they're the most important to me. Then there is my dye book, which contains swatches and records of all my colour experiments, and there is a shibori book, which records outcomes of various physical resist techniques. At the moment there is also my daily mark-making book - I'm now on the third of these.

Sometimes all these things can seem disconnected from each other but it's all research.

A daily practice - part two

March 20, 2015

So immediately after I finished the first forty days of mark-making, I started a second. And since by the end of the first I was working almost exclusively with conté crayon, I decided to switch to ink - my favourite wet medium. I chose another home-made sketchbook - a larger one this time (8 inches square) but, like the first, filled with a mixture of different types of paper. Same principle as before - a minimum of one page a day, any mark. And so I began again.

Then ... frustration! Nothing I did seemed to work out. After becoming really comfortable with the conté crayon all I seemed to get now were ugly, splodgy marks and puddles of ink on the page. And there was another problem. I had to wait for the ink to dry before I could turn the page! So not only did I not like what was happening but I couldn't move on and try something else straightaway.

One of my favourite studio rules is that whatever it is I'm doing - dyeing, drawing, collage - I set out to do at least 10 variations of it. This is because I often find that it's the 7th, 8th and 9th variations that are actually the best - the things I hadn't even thought of when I started. I like to work quickly and encourage the ideas to keep flowing from one sample or drawing to the next. And that's how I had been working during the first forty days ... and now I couldn't.

By the evening of day two (note the extent of my patience!) I was on the verge of running down to the studio and cutting a pile of loose sheets of paper to work on instead of using a book. I talked myself out of it. Partly because it was late and I was tired. But mainly because I reflected that if this was how it was to be, that was going to be part of the practice and I needed to adjust to that. It would mean slowing down and being more deliberate. Taking more time to consider what was happening before moving on.

The first week was painful. I was interested in bleed effects but kept using too much ink or too much water. So my marks would start out looking gorgeous and then degenerate into a splodgy mess. Oh yes, and the wet pages took ages to dry. I had to change my approach. Below are the most acceptable results from that week.

In week two I was placated by some good results from combining Indian ink or Sumi ink (both water-resistant) with the fountain pen inks I favour. There were some pleasing resist effects and contrasts in texture.

There was a sort of breakthrough around Day 16. I changed some of the tools I was using and tried new ways of applying the ink to the page and good things happened. I started to see some unexpected effects that I could get excited about. I also settled into a series of variations on horizontals cut by verticals, playing with different densities and line qualities. I recognise the inspiration of wetlands and reed beds and sometimes I emphasise it. The line between mark-making and drawing is a very thin one - at least in my case.

I had been using pieces of scrap paper as a mask - brushing or sponging ink off the edge - and around day 25 discovered I could mono print the dried ink from these scraps onto a damp page - gorgeous! I also experimented with adding torn pieces of masking tape, which takes the ink differently.

Today is Day 33. There are still "bad" pages - experiments that don't work out or where I have been careless or heavy-handed - but they don't bother me so much. Of course the whole experience has been entirely consistent with the underlying principle of my "rule of 10" - the value of pushing yourself beyond your initial idea in order to discover the thing you hadn't imagined. And the need to pay attention to what is happening and respond to it - change tools, change my approach.

With seven days to go I notice that I'm repeating myself more - recreating marks or effects that I like. Not a bad thing but I think one advantage of doing this practice in forty day blocks is the opportunity to change something each time, to stop it becoming habitual and keep it fresh. I have several ideas for the next 40 days ...

Karen Thiessen - who was one of those who inspired me to do this in the first place - wrote an update on her own mark-making practice and I was also interested in this.

A daily practice

February 7, 2015

Often when I spend time on something that doesn't directly contribute to making work - reading, drawing, mark-making - my mind starts running on all the things I think I should be doing instead. Which pulls my attention away from what I'm doing and creates a conflict between what the experience could be and what it actually is. I think part of the value of a regular practice lies in assigning time for something and giving it your full attention. Giving yourself a chance to notice something you didn't already know. I'm not always particularly good at doing this.

So, at New Year I started a daily mark-making practice. The aim being just to explore my own marks and give myself a chance to experiment. To avoid the New Year Resolution thing, I started the day I went back to work instead. And I committed to 40 days - long enough to see the impact yet short enough to feel achievable. I knew that to be sustainable it also had to be easy - so that on the worst day there would be no excuse for not maintaining it. So there was only one rule - one page a day, any mark, any medium. A single line would count.

I'm using a homemade sketchbook, about 5" (13cm) square, which is filled with different types of paper (a good way to use up offcuts). I've been using whatever tools and media are on my drawing table, which at the moment is conté crayon, fountain pen ink, sumi ink, some white paint. Most days I manage more than one page - the record is twelve. On some days, I have rapidly made some marks five minutes before bedtime. It's amazing how often those aren't the least interesting pages.

A happy side-effect has been handling my drawing materials every single day, which helps to get past any mental block about drawing. Indeed sometimes the mark-making has transitioned seamlessly into drawing - I've tried something out and then pushed my mark-making book to one side and used the same ideas in a more considered drawing.

Somewhere around the 25 day mark I looked back through what I had done. I noticed how often I had defaulted to two or three "formulae" - the habitual marks I make when I am not working from a source. My natural handwriting in a sense. This was interesting in itself but I started to look for ways I could disrupt these patterns. Not change the marks themselves necessarily but force myself to use them differently. In my case this was partly about my use of space and varying the line quality. I'm experimenting with masking parts of the page, erasing, rubbing or scratching back, drawing over wet paint - looking at what effects this has on the marks and how it changes what I do.

I have seven days to go. I think I will start another forty days after that - same rules, same principles, perhaps with a different technique or medium - but I think the main thing is just to keep going.

Some others who have experimented with a daily practice:

Fiona Wilson - 365 days - a print a day

Leslie Morgan - a collage a day

Karen Thiessen Lent - 15 minutes mark-making a day for 40 days

Winter

December 14, 2014

I have been away for most of December. The studio is cold and littered with half-unpacked work and supplies from workshops I've been to. The most recent was one with Matthew Harris at the Committed to Cloth studio. The starting point was text - treating handwritten text as a form of drawing. We played with this until our drawings no longer resembled any intelligible writing. I had a lot of fun experimenting with three dimensional drawing using wire and torn shreds of cloth. I loved the shadows this cast on the wall or the table.

At one point Matthew warned us we should expect to feel a little lost as we began to experiment and move away from our starting points. This certainly proved to be true! That feeling of not knowing where you were, what you were doing or where things were going was unsettling. It was an interesting experience to be consciously aware that I was lost and observe myself trying to find my way again! The way my mind started searching for connections to things I already knew or ways of making what I was doing intelligible (to myself, that is). Which, of course, is how we learn. And if we never allow ourselves to get a little lost occasionally, we never move forward.

When I came home I started re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost". She talks about how for artists "the unknown ... is what must be found" - it's where the work comes from. But I also recalled this point:

“Explorers ... “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” ”

— Rebecca Solnit (quoting Aaron Sachs): "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", chapter 1

The willingness to explore and find new things requires a willingness to tolerate the sense of being lost. But some robust skills to build upon and having some sense of where you want to go can make the difference between just being helplessly confused and finding a way through - in artistic terms as much as in exploration.

Meanwhile, Winter arrived here at the beginning of December. The wind moved to the north and the temperature plummeted. The last leaves are clinging to otherwise bare trees. The first regular frosts have appeared - silvery edges to the leaves and frozen puddles. The sky has been a study in grey - sometimes stormy, sometimes like pearl - and occasionally pale, cold blue. Sometimes the only colours in the landscape are a myriad of different greys with a shot of brilliant green of moss on a wall or winter crops in the fields. Some people think this is a dull and dreary time of year but I love the colours and the way the landscape changes in winter. Everything is stripped to its bones and you can see the underlying structures of the trees and the land. All the lines are emphasised.

I've been in Norfolk for a week - long walks on the marshes, by the sea and across fields. Plenty of opportunity to appreciate the winter landscape.

Amazing light effects - low sun under a bank of cloud over the roadbeds at Cley

Twilight.  A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point. — Twilight. A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point.

Morston.  Low tide.  One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats. — Morston. Low tide. One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats.

Beautiful colours and lines - a decaying Gunnera leaf

Fragments

November 4, 2014

I spent almost the whole of last week at West Dean on a short course with Michael Brennand-Wood. The park and gardens were in their full autumn glory. Early morning walks started in fog or mist and ended in sunshine. I love the way the mist obscures background detail and emphasises outlines - like a Chinese painting ... but with sheep.

The rest of each day was spent working intensely in the workshop studio. The theme of Brennand-Wood's course was subtraction, erasure and conjecture - what happens when information is taken away or physical details removed or rearranged? At what point does this process of subtraction result in something new? Now, this post isn't directly about the workshop - I will be digesting what I did and what I learned from that for a while I think. However the work we did (mine and others') plus discussions within the group did lead me to think about fragments.

“Fragment:
1. A part broken off or detached from the whole
2. Something incomplete; an odd bit or piece
3. To break up into fragments ...

In order for an object or form to be perceived as a fragment there must be a clear sense of a whole. ...
There is an instinctive tendency in humans to establish a relationship between elements wherever possible. Even subtle clues are often sufficient to trigger connections between one unit and another. ...
Fragments introduce the notion of mystery or puzzle-solving.”

— Tim McCreight "Design Language"

Fragments have a particular aesthetic - think of ruined buildings, patched or worn textiles, broken ceramic or corroded metal. These things have a past. And it is the signs of wear, age or use that often attract us. But our need to make sense of them - to fit things back together, whether in our imagination or in reality - can create its own problems of interpretation. In the absence of complete information, we make assumptions, guess and impose our own beliefs about how the original thing should look. Sometimes this will create a new identity for the object we're trying to reconstruct. Sometimes this will exaggerate certain features, taking them out of context in a way that actually makes the object more abstract.

In the same way, our minds record fragments of information and we piece them together in the way that makes sense to us. This applies to how we experience being in the landscape too. When we are actually there we are immersed and surrounded by sensory impressions. But in order to process this experience, we focus on particular fragments of those impressions - specific sights, sounds, smells - we remember a place in fragments. Or so it seems to me. And likewise, the photos I take and the objects I pick up preserve physical fragments of that experience.

Found objects are usually themselves fragments - things that have been used and discarded; things that have been weathered, shed or dropped as part of a natural process of ageing or growth. Part of their attraction is sometimes that physical connection with something - the animal's bone; the bird's feather, a place. But the finding can be as important as the object. It's not the same when someone gives me a stone or a shell as opposed to when I find it myself. The objects I find are associated directly with a place and time. Sometimes very specifically, so that it is enough to look at the object to remember other details about the day I found it. Whereas when someone gives me something they have found, the association is with the person, the circumstances of the giving and whatever they tell me about it. So the found object is not independent of the context in which it is found.

These thoughts are fragmentary. I can sense that they are interconnected in ways I don't fully understand - part of a larger idea. Meanwhile I am looking at images of objects that are fragmented or pieced together from many smaller pieces. We'll see if this leads somewhere.

Procrastinating

August 17, 2014

This week I tidied my desk. Then I tidied my study. Then I tidied my studio. It may not look that tidy but any time the floor and most of the work surfaces are clear counts as tidy enough for me. In general I tend to feel that a spotless studio is one where not a lot of work is happening ... but on the other hand I love it when the studio is clean and I have lots of space again.

I'm not a tidy worker. I like to leave things out when I'm working on something. I like to be able to see everything. After a while, surfaces get taken over by piles of this or piles of that. When I urgently need some space, a pile gets moved to the floor. As long as everything stays in its pile, I know where it is.

But I don't like clutter. Eventually it just frustrates me and I have to clear up. Of course, when I do tidy up, I spend about a third of the time cleaning and putting stuff away and the other two thirds looking at things. The random drawing I had dismissed that now looks rather interesting. Accidental fabric combinations that suggest something new. The book or article I haven't got around to reading. It has always been this way with me.

And all the time I have been clearing up this week, I am perfectly aware that the other thing that is going on here is that I am procrastinating. For a few weeks now I have been finding it really hard to settle. I have worked, but it has been piecemeal. Nibbling at the edges. Better than nothing of course, but I've been frustrated with myself, feeling that I'm not getting on with things; not making best use of my time.

I realised that the problem is that there are too many things I want to do. I listed out in my sketchbook all the ideas and experiments I want to try. It's a long list. I also want to spend some time drawing. Meanwhile, back in the house I have a pile of things to read, watch and write about. And there is work in progress to finish. So when I do have studio time I find myself torn between the playful, experimental things versus the things I feel I "should" be doing. The result is that I haven't made real progress with anything ... and it became easier to tidy my desk, my study and then my studio than to do something more creative.

The clutter in my studio mirrored the clutter in my head. Now the studio is tidy I need another clear out, following much the same principles. I need to take care of the things that really must get done because that nagging "you should be doing x" feeling is what's stopping me from settling down to the more interesting stuff. But perhaps I can operate the same 1:2 rule - a third of the time on the "musts" and the "shoulds"; the rest on the experimental things that may lead nowhere ... or may move my work forward.

Exhibition details:

Helen Terry

fabric, colour, texture, art, craft, creativity.