Rebecca recommended a series of short videos on YouTube about elderly artists living in New York made by Joshua Charow.
In one of them, the artist, John Willenbecker, comments that he thinks that he could be a really great artist if he didn’t care about anything else except his work. He quotes Ad Reinhardt as saying that ‘one paints when there is nothing else to do. After everything is done, has been taken care of, one can take up the brush. After all the human social needs, pressures are accounted for. Only then can we be free to work.’
Try being a female artist with a family, I thought to myself.
I often become distracted; I’ll put a pan of water on to boil and then get distracted by something and go wandering off, only remembering that I was meant to be boiling some eggs when the pan has boiled dry.
I was cutting some lino yesterday and I collected the bits of lino on a piece of tissue paper. As I was lifting it up to dispose of them I thought, ‘oh that looks interesting’. And off I went. I wrapped some tissue paper around an old photo frame. I couldn’t be botherered to go off and find clamps etc so I balanced the frame on some books on two chairs. I then set up a couple of anglepoise lamps. Lying flat on my back on the kitchen floor allowed me to photograph the tissue paper from underneath. I experimented with the lino bits as well as some packaging which I had saved, just in case it might come in useful.
To save me from getting up and down, I enlisted some help with the sprinkling. These are the results:
I really like the effect of the lino bits – they are dynamic and have the sense of someone having just made some quick gestural marks. I like the added depth provided by the bits that are further away from the surface of the tissue paper.
I really like the effect in the photos. The first one in both sets is without any backlight and it almost looks like something trying to break through the tissue paper – like something crawling under the skin. It would have been good to try with just a few bits, but by the time I had the thought, I had put everything away, but something for the future.
I also made a video of the ‘sprinkling’. Otto, the dog, was in the kitchen at the time and decided to have a bark and come close to my head grunting like a pig. I was in the process of cleaning up the audio – I was even going to try out Garage Band – but then decided not to. I used some audio effects in Capcut – Deep 2, Echo and Super Reverb. I wanted to make the audio unexpected – the sprinkling of something light has been distorted so that it sounds unusually heavy and the background noises are unexpected when heard with the visual which I think makes it more interesting and unexpected.
April is a strange month. On the one hand lighter nights, Spring, and so many birthdays, including my daughter’s. On the other, my mother’s birthday and the third anniversary of her death. It’s not surprising that she’s been on my mind.
My thoughts have turned back to microchimerism. I’ve mentioned this before, mainly in the context of siblings in The Invasive Sibling. In that post I also refer to the mother’s cells travelling into the baby via the two-way street that is the umbilical chord, something that I didn’t really think about any further at the time. I was doomscrolling on Instagram earlier, and came across a post which was about this very thing. It took me aback in the moment, and its profundity made me suddenly feel really emotional.
In general terms, it’s a difficult one to get my head around – the mother is inside the child, which in turn is inside the mother.
I’ve spent the last few days chained to my laptop copying and pasting most of my 195 blog posts (now plus one!) into a word document. Am I regretting my decision to make a book out of my blog? No, because it feels like it’s ticking a big box somewhere inside of me – it’s keeping my chimp happy – I’m making something that evidences the last two years. It will leave me free to experiment with something else.
That said, I have already reminded myself that I have never made a book before and so the process is very much an experiment, and that I should have no expectations as to the result.
I have formulated a plan though. The book is going to be in A5 format as that avoids the need to deal with things like columns. I’m going to print it in a series of booklets – signatures – of 5 sheets of A4 which equates to 20 pages. These will then be stitched together – I’m currently thinking no more than 10 in a single volume and then covered with a hardback cover. I am thinking that I may use some canvas that I have knocking around which I could paint, draw, print and stitch onto. Alternatively, I could try sheer fabric, cotton or linen. I’ll need to experiment. Even the end papers could be pieces in themselves.
I have already formatted and printed off a couple of signatures. It’s definitely going to run to more than a single volume, so I think that I’ll format and print off the first 10 signatures and make a single book just to see how it goes, rather than spending time formatting and printing out all of the blog.
Thus far the process has revealed a couple of things. Firstly, I need to be mindful that future posts will have to be included, so it may be an idea to limit posts going forward – but who am I kidding? Secondly, in carrying out the exercise I have relived the past two years and it has been helpful to note ideas that I have had along the way and which I could develop in the future, as well as discovering some draft posts which I didn’t publish, perhaps because I wasn’t quite ready. This is an example of part of one which was on the subject of perfectionism:
‘But old habits die hard and when my mother became ill I couldn’t process it on an emotional level and so I became the best carer that I could be, which now I regret because at times it meant that I wasn’t the best daughter that I could be. To this day I can’t understand why, when she said she fancied a gin and tonic, I told her that she couldn’t have it because she was taking morphine. She was dying, what did it matter? It is one of my biggest regrets. And when she didn’t eat one of the many offerings I had made for her, it was because I was a failure, because I wasn’t able to find that one thing that she would want to eat.
I had the same thought this evening as Monty, the dog, only had a few little bits of meat which he had been quite happily eating yesterday. What am I doing wrong? What is it that he wants that I’m not offering him?
And, of course, the answer is nothing. I can only do what I can do in the circumstances. If he was hungry he would eat. If my mother had been hungry she would have eaten what I had made for her. Even if they did eat, it’s not really enough to make any significant difference. I’m not responsible for them not eating. There is nothing that I can do on a practical level anymore to avoid having to deal with the inevitable outcome. ‘
I suppose that it’s only natural to pause and reflect on the fact that there are only 10 weeks left: 10 more Tuesday sessions with everyone, 1 more tutorial. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling as if time is slipping through my fingers like sand, that it seems like a blink of an eye since we started, temporally that is because I know that I have undergone enormous change in the interim. When I think back to the session in which we had to introduce ourselves and our work, I find it difficult to reconcile myself to the person I was back then. I now see, think and make differently.
I feel sad.
But all good things must come to an end. I’m trying to subdue that part of me that is panicking that I haven’t made the most out of the last 2 years. But I know that I have; what I’m feeling is the knowledge that there is so much more that I want to try and to experiment with, and that this is not the end, but the next step. So mingled with the melancholy is a flicker of excitement at what the future may bring.
Today I was at the library in Winchester working on reformatting my blog so that I can make it into a book, whilst my daughter did some revision. The library, recently rebranded as The Arc, has lots going on from talks, plays, life drawing classes as well as a small gallery. The exhibition on at the moment is Patterns of Power by Yinka Shonibare RA. Shonibare explores cultural identity and colonialism. He uses African fabrics in his work. African wax prints were introduced to Africa by the Dutch who took inspiration from the Batik designs of Indonesia, which at that time was a Dutch colony.
It was a riot of colour from screen prints, sculpture to woodblock and collage.
No threads, apart from the woven kind, but I found the collage and his use of fabric particularly interesting.
Whilst I was in London I went to the Hayward Gallery to see Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life.
It was captivating. It wasn’t just the scale, the sheer amount and complexity of the thread, or its immersive effect, it was also the effect it had on what is viewed through it. I stood in front of the dress in the cabinet for ages. The fragmentation of the image of the dress through the threads gives it an almost spectral presence. I was also fascinated by how the threads were stapled to the wall, and woven in between each other, casting shadows which create further depth.
I watched some footage of her working when I got back, and looked at some of her drawings. They remind me of Do Ho Suh. Having used thread recently, I can see myself using it more in the future. I even like the effect of it in the photos, which are only 2D images.
I chose the etching workshop on the Low Res. The others didn’t really appeal to me. At least this year I was a little less ‘rabbit in the headlights’, although I’m not sure about my choice just to draw wavy lines. The etching process was fine – I remembered most of it from last year.
I quite like them when they are placed side by side.
And then Paul mentioned the word ‘aquatint’. I had trouble with it last year – working out what was going on. I understood it a bit better this time, but I don’t think that my image was best suited to it. At times the fine lines disappeared and I was left with blocks of tone, and even Paul’s suggestion to use extender didn’t really make it any better. A bit of creativity in the inking up process just about had me feeling ok about it. This is probably the best one.
When I got home I cut up the ones that didn’t really work and played around with weaving using varying widths.
I like the last one best. I might experiment with them a bit more.
This time last year I was feeling like I had an awful lot to process as a result of the Low Res, and that I couldn’t really get on with very much until I had done so. This year I don’t have the luxury of time. The ‘end’ of the course is nigh. I really need to make the most of what time is left.
Thoughts inevitably turn to the end of year show. I’m still thinking that I will take Jonathan’s advice and keep on as I am, seeing where I am at when the time comes. I’m no longer fixating on a large final piece. I will probably show a few smaller pieces of work, depending on what I have to hand. However, I keep returning to the idea that my blog is a piece in itself. Jonathan and I have previously discussed making it into a book. From what I can see, there are websites that will do this for me but there is little editorial control, and I’m not sure that farming it out to a third party would make it a developmental experience. I think that I would like to make an artefact of sorts out of the blog, and I am thinking about making a book myself. How difficult can it be? Probably, deceptively so, but I’m going to give it a go anyway.
As with last year, I received my annual rejection from the RA during the Low Res. I think that’s the seventh year in a row. My instagram feed is littered with posts by successful applicants, and more recently by unsuccessful ones. They all prove how subjective art is. One caught my attention: how the applicant is trying not to take it personally, but how it is so difficult when she is her art.
I think that I am resolved that I am not my art – it is something that I have made; it is not me, at least not the present me. Even if it is, I came to terms a long time ago with the idea that I can’t please all of the people all of the time, and so it follows that not everyone will like the art that I make.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 