FLOW

FLOW is weaving it's way towards us on Monday 6th August...
Two amazing models will work together amongst the massive baskets by Annemarie O'Sullivan. I have asked them to come and interact with the installation and each other while participants in the workshop have the opportunity to draw them. At the beginning of the session which lasts from 10 am till 3 pm people will have the time to make their own drawing tools from basket making materials to use with ink.
Materials provided.
Booking essential through the Fabrica office 01273 778646
Booking fee £5 payable in advance as places are in demand.

Retirement home visit with the volunteers

I met Najat, Ken, Anoushka and Helen outside in the cold July wind.
Today was the day the volunteers presented the images they had designed for the mural, based on the picture research I had done with the residents (described in past blogs) identifying what kind of image they could all enjoy for their empty wall(s).
I was a little nervous as quite a few weeks have passed since my last visit, between people being on holiday and work commitments it's taken a while to assemble us all together.
We had a slightly awkward beginning as I introduced the volunteers to the group but things soon warmed up as we all sat and chatted over a cup of tea before getting down to the selection business. As soon as Anoushka put her drawings on the table quickly followed by ken and Najat and I saw the reactions on the residents faces I knew everything would be fine.

They were all delighted by what they saw, so delighted in fact they were comfortable enough to say what they preferred in this one and that one. What made it easier was the quality of the ideas and the obvious amount of thought that had gone into the design and the execution of the drawings presented. The images summed up brilliantly the choices that the residents had made from looking at the 100 or so images that we had viewed previously to make a kind of working brief.
They liked parts of all three images and because the volunteers had worked so closely to the residents preferred idea of the garden compressed into a foreground, it was possible for them to agree to work on a kind of amalgamation of their images for the mural.
It was clear that the residents liked the variety of birds in Ken's, the atmosphere and drawing in Najat's and the bright cheering calm and structure of Anoushka's. I want to put pictures of all of them up on the blog but only have a copy of Najat's at present, I'll add the others when they send them to me.

We have the dates to go ahead and the volunteers will begin painting next Thursday after we've had a fun afternoon choosing colours out at Seawhites on Wednesday.

Najat's initial design

Najat's final design

nice drawing day

We had a productive drawing day in the gap between the spring show closing and the summer show beginning, with the whole gallery to spread out in last month. Frankie and Zoe modelled together, seemingly telepathically, and were inventive and intuitive in the way they worked. It was a challenging day mostly focussed on movement which is always difficult to tackle and culminated with sharing ideas and a chance to develop the drawings further.

obliquity

With my head buried in the difficulties of designing a workshop around laughter as a subject, I went off on a tangent the trail of which is now lost, the result however was spectacular (although not in the least bit funny).
I rediscovered the old chestnut of the art /science link through the beautiful drawings of the pioneering Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal 1852-1934.

last minute preparations for Monday's drawing workshop

Preparations for workshops are always more involved than I think.
It seemed like a fairly straight forward idea to record people reading, but now I need to edit the files and put them in an order and then in a form that will not fail me during the workshop. There are tiny technical complications that wear out the afternoon. Thank god I have help, well thank David anyway.

Tomorrow is "Drawing from word to image" and the more I get ready for it the more potential I see within the idea. I go off on tangents like an animal sniffing scent then I remember I've got to settle on a structure. I've been pondering it for days, buying drawing materials, popping in and out of Fabrica catching people with poems in the kitchen, in the gallery, in the Friends centre.

I have recorded some poems read by amazing people, in Polish, Spanish, Catalan, Neopolitan, and Greek, they have either unearthed poems that mean something to them or are poets in their own right. They have all done this as a favour and I am moved and grateful for their contributions. However I can't use all the material for this one workshop so I'm agonising over editing down to one poem from each person.
I will be posting all of these poems as sound files on this blog soon, come back and have a listen they are well worth it.

Well it's all safely on a memory stick now in the right order, just need to sort out the bags of stuff and take them in to Fabrica, and then I can worry about what I might have forgotten.

I wonder if it would be an idea to do a drawing marathon at Fabrica sometime, night and day, or a week long. Would that enable me to do everything, to follow all the tangents?

25/4/12 Mural project

Extramural chats over tea - retirement home

 

Today I returned with another stack of colour images trawled from the Internet after hours of varying search terms and finding all kinds of unexpected loveliness. It's amazing to think I used to do all this sort of image research from books alone.

 

I was honing down the style of drawing and painting after our conversation last week based on the landscape pictures I showed them. They had given me good feed back on what they thought was too ugly, too rich, too abstract, too busy, too dark, too naïve etc. as well as good colour, good clear lines, beautiful fragility, cheerful blossom, from which I had gathered an idea about style as well as a better idea about content.

 

In my search I found an amazing archive of seed packets from 19th century American seed producers like "Childs" and Burpees" on http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/SeedNurseryCatalogs/

They were beautifully illustrated with the brightest colours imaginable, and included some flowers I haven't seen for years like these gloxinias...

 

Everyone loved these pictures but then put them on the too bright pile when they came across the coloured drawings by Charles Renee Mackintosh, these were unanimously liked for their clarity and delicacy...

 

Today's unanimous favourite image (below) was a plate from a C16th Italian manuscript at Ickworth House. The small pictures of birds by some of these artists were well appreciated too as long as the ones we included in the mural were life sized and not smaller.

 

Images rejected because of colour or style were by William Morris, Elizabeth Blackadder, William de Morgan and a few random pictures of pomegranates.

The good news today was that the residents have voted to spend money on the materials from their own funds and the council have agreed to match it.

I ended the morning just sitting and listening to a lot of laughing about the very basic nature of some childhood toilets, the surreptitious gathering of veg from allotments to make pies for brothers lunches and new plans to get a group together to make bunting for the 3rd June. If any one reading this has any material in red or white and or blue, and long lengths of cloth tape, please let me know because they are in need of it in the next few weeks.

My next task is to have a good long chat with the volunteers about design and execution based on the images that have been selected by the group I've been talking with. I know there are two volunteers with exactly the right skills to lead the next part, and several more with good drawing and painting skills; I just hope they have the time.

 

 

Retirement home visit no.2

18/4/12
Went to the retirement home again today. I took a lot of landscape and garden pictures based on what people had shown a preference for as a subject for their mural at the last coffee morning.

I had just over 60 images of landscapes by painters as disparate as Egon Schiele, Ivon Hitchens and Eric Ravilious. I was fascinated by what people were interested in and what they hated, I was pleased I'd decided to take so many examples to discuss. We passed them around the table a few times, discussing the comparitive merits of colour, perspective and style, putting some to one side and then mixing them up again. Finally I held them up one at a time for mass scrutiny in order to make a pile of images that contained things people liked, and another of what they really didn't.

See the full gallery on Posterous

I asked them to look at the pictures not as complete images but as prompts and samples of nature. So "I like that picture" wasn't a useful comment but "I like the texture of the gold leaves on the ground between the trees, but I don't like the trees and I'd prefer the colours to be more green" about a Klimt painting of a birch tree wood in autumn was just the right kind of information.

I was interested to notice that the Klimt paintings were popular except when they were "too full", it seemed that people generally didn't like the overpowering heaviness in his paintings of trees and plants but liked the colours and some of the shapes. This surprised me because I thought the oppressive floweryness of some of the Klimt gardens full of hollyhocks and delphiniums described a full border at the height of a warm summer perfectly. When I look at those paintings my ears fill with the sound of bees. I had never thought of them as being confusing or too full but I can see their point.

Generally they liked Schiele's crucified yet delicate trees and the muted colours, but they didn't like Ravilious' subject or colour when I showed some of his images of the Downs.

I was struck by how a few people had difficulty reading some of the images; they saw figures with boots on in plants, or snowmen instead of paths, we had a laugh about that.
Anyway I think I can see a way forward to the next stage and we have agreed that I should go back with more specifically garden, blossom tree and plant based images. I have a style of approach in mind from what people said about what they saw so I will be interested if I have got it right.

The overall unanimous favourite painting of the morning was Van Gogh's blossom tree on what looks to be a manganese blue sky (but that might just be my printer).