On this blog. Once I have my website up and running I’ll continue to write and reflect on there.
It was our last session last Tuesday.
No-one seemed to be in a hurry to leave at the end. Pressing the ‘Leave Meeting’ button felt momentous.
Next the End of Year Show and then…
Whatever information existed about me on the internet was secreted away in tiny amounts on disparate websites, and should anyone want to find out anything about me, they would have to spend oodles of time searching, trawling and collating. Now, Google AI will do it almost instantaneously, and even suggest follow-up questions.
Of course, accuracy cannot be guaranteed – not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing. In fact, a google search of my husband reveals lots of information about me and my daughter as well as unearthing a secret love child by the name of Josh. Luckily the man in the photo isn’t my husband, but a former work colleague. Needless to say, this second family has become something of a standing joke…
Well, having decided to fit the whole of the blog (so far) into two volumes, it became necessary to review the format. Having gone through all of the blog I thought that the final number of pages would be just under 600 which would mean 300 pages per book. This would mean increasing the number of signatures which could make things quite bulky at the spine and so I decided to reduce the number of sheets in each signature from 5 to 4. I had to reformat all of the text into 16 page booklets. It was a real pain as images and text began to move about all over the place.
Anyway, I finally managed to finish it and print out the first volume by the end of the Scotland match last night. As I was part way into the second volume I thought to myself that the posts I was printing out were really quite recent. Turns out that there are 500 not 600 pages and far from being 2 evenly sized volumes the first is going to be much bigger than the second.
I had to laugh at myself – I was thinking that everything was going a bit too well. So they are going to be odd books with quite a few errors in which I missed when I reformatted the text. One of the pages isn’t numbered either – that would have really irritated me two years ago and I would have printed it all out again to get it right. I just smiled to myself and thought that no-one is going to notice it and that if they do, then that’s really sad… for them! It’s my secret.
I woke up this morning with the thought in my head that I only have enough greyboard to make one book. I couldn’t get back to sleep until I had dealt with this problem, as I’ve really only got this weekend to finish the books. I’m not sure how this has happened – I’ve known since April that I’m making two books. I also realised at the end of last week that I’ve only got a little bit of archival glue left, so I had to order some more of that too.
Maybe I have some sort of anxiety about making the books – they’re the only pieces I’m making that I have an end product in mind – after the unsuccessful first attempt, maybe I’m delaying having to deal with them. Dilly dallying. Ironically, the experimental pieces are all ready to go off on Wednesday for the beginning of the show installation.
Maybe I don’t want the last two years to end…
I sat down this morning with a determination to get cracking on curating my blog. After all, it should be quite easy as I’ve been going through my blog to format it for my book.
But where to start? So much overlap. What goes where?
So I went outside and cut the grass. I might do a spot of weeding as well, and there’s that large pile of laundry waiting to be ironed.
I’m not sure whether this is life imitating art, or my art imitating my life. Or whether there is even a distinction any more.
My daughter phoned me yesterday, after her final exam. That’s it, she’s done, she’s finished, university is over. Another chapter in her life is coming to an end as another is about to begin.
That’s not the only achievement. Whilst she was at home over the Easter holiday she drove a car for the first time since her head-on collision last May. She felt she was ready – she had been having dreams that she was driving and felt bereft when she woke up to discover that it wasn’t real. A far cry from the flashbacks she had been having. So, I went with her for a couple of drives, and then she asked me how I would feel if she went solo. I told her that I was ok with it if she felt comfortable, rather perplexed by the seriousness with which she had asked the question. Well, you were traumatised by the accident as well and I want to make sure that you feel comfortable with me going by myself.
I’ve been thinking about this conversation and wondering why I was surprised by it and why I’m not still carrying the fall out from the accident with me – what could have happened, and what did happen to my one and only. Maybe it’s because after it happened I was making – experimenting with drawing maps and hands – and writing about it on this blog. It makes me wonder how differently other things might have turned out had I been making art or had written about it at the time.
So, having taped all of the test sheets togther into what I called my ‘play sheet’, I let rip with the small pieces of linocut I had found. I also used the lino of the shape that I’m not intending to use, although I still really like the shape of it. The full print of it doesn’t fit with the background, although I do like the way the background disrupts it. I experimented with just using the outline which I think is effective, experimenting with the quality of the outline by using a bold line painted on with printing ink, some thinned down ink and some charcoal. I also added to some other areas with a brush as well as coloured pencils. I think that I need to sit with it for a while to identify those elements that work – it’s got everything but the kitchin sink in it. Hopefully, some clarity will emerge from the chaos.
I have some initial thoughts.
Printing the solid shapes of lino wasn’t very effective but I do like those bits where I scratched away some of ink from the surface before printing. I also like the muted contour lines in a light grey. The darker colours definitely need greater transparency (I was thinking about the shadow cast by the stone).
It’s a starting point and the next step is to work on a slightly larger piece of paper trying to get the transparency of ink right, adding in some masked areas, and to work out a colour palette. I’ll keep using the lino offcuts for now.
I was a bit disappointed about the lined shape – I really love the effect you get when they overlap and the lines distort. Maybe I need to try something separately but incorporating elements of today’s experimenting, perhaps even including elements of collage. Maybe I could try using mulberry paper, or try sticking with monochrome – it felt a bit strange using so much colour, but I think that I was feeling in a celebratory mood.
That said, there are some areas that I like.
As I was experimenting I thought that what I really want is to achieve some thin veils of colour between the bubble layer and the print – like the effect you get when you glaze in oil painting. I’ve questioned recently whether I should try oil painting again. I haven’t done any for so long as I haven’t been going to my classes. It would be like meeting up with an old friend who I haven’t seen for a long time and during which time I have changed considerably. Would I get sucked into being my old self, or would they be happy to accept me as I am now?
Structure seems to be the word of the moment.
After the video feedback session this week, we discussed some of the structures around art that aren’t the actual art making. One of the areas we discussed in our group was social and online media. Eleana told us a story about her practising a pitch and one of the people giving feedback wanted to know more about the rest of her work so that she could see it and decide on the piece being pitched in context. So, people being able to see the bigger picture of you is important.
Sorting out a website has been something that I’ve had on my list of things to do in my head. I think it’s inportant going forward, after the end of the course.
As I sit here looking out of the window in need of a good clean, my husband is cutting the overgrown grass. The glass table has turned opaque with dust and the dog is giving off an overly ripe odour (well, at least I think it’s the dog).
And this is how I know that the way I have been working, particularly recently, is not sustainable. The ‘it’s for my course’ has been both a blessing and a curse. It has validated me spending time making art but on the other hand, as usual, I have gone all in and seen it as a permission to be totally selfish and to allow my head to be somewhere else for most of the time and, to be fair, I did warn them that this would be the case. There have been times when I’ve been so caught up in the intensity of making that I’ve emerged at the other end feeling like I’ve binge-watched a box set or had one too many chunky Kit Kats. I’ve needed a break after such episodes, which probably explains why my rhythm of making is not consistent but in sporadic bursts.
Everything in moderation – isn’t that the key? Well, perhaps not necessarily in moderation, but certainly with more attention on life in general. It’s getting to the stage where I’m finding it difficult to hold more than one thought in my head at a time – road taxing the car and whether I should try cyanotyping on tracing paper. I used to think that I should allow myself to be submerged in the making process for as long as I need to, at the expense of whatever else was going on; to seize the inspiration and run with it. But that’s not the way forward. Once this course is over I won’t be able to say that ‘it’s for my course’.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I have recognised that I need a little structure, nothing too rigid but with enough strength to support my practice in how, when and where I make. For the first part of this course I went full on into experimenting to try and rid myself of the product driven perfectionist self. This approach worked as I immersed myself in the process not worrying about results but simply making and responding, although I realise that I can never be truly free from that side of myself. It felt so liberating, but having broken out there was so much out there for me to try and I suddenly felt the urge to try everything. But I don’t do well with overwhelm – even the process of deciding on a research question overwhelmed and subsequently paralysed me. In the past I have reacted to overwhelm by going to the extreme of trying to take control. In retrospect, I now see that didn’t work either, so there must be a half-way house.
Because of the contentment that I felt when I started making the line drawings at the beginning of the last term, I now realise that whilst I my practice is still very firmly rooted in the experimental and the process, I do need some soft structure to keep my perfectionist goal-driven self, quiet. This soft structure in how I make takes the form of repetitive mark-making, using the same patterns and motifs such as the contour lines, my father’s silhouette, automatic line drawings etc. Just recently I’ve also found that working on more than one thing at once has also been beneficial. When I get fed up of formatting the blog for the book, I go and do something else and whilst that is drying I move on to another. I also think that the concept of soft structure will also enable me to make work which is capable of fulfilling a brief as opposed to being solely the result of experimentation, which has been a concern of mine in looking towards the future.
In terms of where I make, I am in the process of sorting out an outbuilding where I will be working. I have been sorting it out for the last two years, but up until now I haven’t really needed it. I need it now to create a separate physical space to work where it will be more difficult for everyday life to encroach. Getting a studio somewhere would probably be the cleanest solution, but then what about those days when I’m not really in the mood? At least this way I’ve only a short walk.
As for when I make, the making the most of the moment approach will have to change because of its impact on everyday life. I need to decide how much of my time is to be spent on my practice and when. Making a rigid timetable won’t work – my work plan to my Study Statement proves that. Maybe a general aim to spend x hours a week, or a number of half days. I think that’s something which will emerge in practice. So, from now on, as an experiment, I will spend my mornings during the week on art making and course related activities. After lunch I will then concentrate on everyday tasks and once they have been completed, I’m free to return to art. Obviously, I’ll have to fit in other activities so there will have to be some adjustments.
The irony of having to separate my everyday life from my art practice which is grounded in everyday life, doesn’t escape me.
I’ve learnt my lesson from the 3-minute video. I set about the 5-minute video by writing down what I wanted to say first and then selecting images with reference to the voice over. There was some adjusting in between with tweaks to the audio. The difficulty was getting the structure right so that there was minimal repetition of thoughts and ideas. But 5 minutes of my dulcet tones! Something had to change.
So I restructured it in the form of an interview, using Speechify to alter my voice to a middle aged man called Benjamin. There was no particular reason for this choice other than his voice was the least irritating and also I wanted a male voice so there is a clear difference between the two.
I’ve learnt and developed even more in the process of making it.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 