Apparently, Guns N’ Roses didn’t know how to end their most successful song, Sweet Child O Mine. Whilst in the recording studio, Axl Rose reputedly started singing, ‘Where do we go? Where do we go now?’ And the rest is history and, in my humble opinion, probably the best bit of the song.

So a moment of inspired creativity can come from a total lack of direction and confusion. Here’s hoping…

I’m resolved to wallowing in the myre of confusion. There’s not much point in fighting it; I can’t understand everything. The latest book we read in my book club was Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. I’ve never read a book like it. It deals with the mental decline and eventual death of the New Orleans cornet player, Buddy Bolden, who is considered to be the father of jazz. I didn’t understand what was going on half of the time, who was talking, and to whom. It jumped around all over the place. There aren’t any chapters as such, just three parts, no speech marks and paragraphs end at odd points on the page and continue on the next – visually it is striking. It is a book to be read, not to be listened to; its format echoes the improvisation and syncopation of jazz music. Once I had decided that perhaps I wasn’t supposed to understand it and just went along with it, reading each phrase and word in its own right, looking at the patterns, and the sounds of the words, a bit like reading a poem (after all, Ondaatje is a poet), I got a lot more out of it.

So this is how I intend to move forward. And it’s just as well, because try as I might to keep up with the constant flow of information being offered up by Paul in the Low Res etching workshop, I just couldn’t. I started taking notes, but just gave up in the end and surrendered myself up to not understanding anything and just enjoying being along for the ride.

It kicked off with Paul showing us what we could have gone home with, had we the requisite skills. There were some impressive prints which demonstrated the versatility of printmaking which I hadn’t really fully appreciated until now.

We started off by putting down a hard ground on a zinc plate and then we had about 20 minutes to create the image using a selection of Paul’s tools. What to do? I had a quick look on my phone and chose Schiele’s Small Tree in Late Autumn.

This is the plate once the hard ground had been removed and it had been cleaned followed by the printed images, using aquatint on the last one.

How do I feel about them? Pretty good bearing in mind I only had 20 minutes to create the plate and I had very little idea what I was supposed to be doing most of the time. Will I do it again? I don’t know – it’s very process driven, and whilst I love the excitement and anticipation of the big reveal, I’m more of an instant gratification kind of person. That’s not to say that I’ve ruled out etching altogether, it’s just that I would need a greater understanding of the different and quite complicated steps involved to do it any justice, and that’s just not compatible with the ‘new me’ at the moment.