Category Thoughts

Prints

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I’ve decided that I would like to make physical prints for the Editions Sale, if possible, and I have resolved to do a linocut, on the basis that I don’t have an etching press at home, and I probably won’t be able to make it in to CSM this month. I also want it to be something which is relevant to, and an extension of, my recent work.

I’ve not much experience of linocutting, but this is a good opportunity to try and improve my skills. I’ve been experimenting with some of the mapping imagery that I’ve been exploring over the last few months.

Originally I thought about the line drawing I did and how form can emerge from lines. I used my father’s silhouette from Solitude to experiment.

The lines are all over the place as I did them freehand (how does Bridget Riley manage?) and there were a few errors. In the top half I experimented with rounded curves, whilst in the bottom half the lines are flatter.

I tried drawing out how it might work but in the end I decided that it would just be too difficult, and gave up.

I then looked at the contouring and the automatic drawing that I have incorporated into some of my recent work. I used a group of three figures, composition yet to be decided, and red and blue as the colour choice for the time being. I created multiple layers in Procreate which then allowed me to play around with possible combinations.

I like the red and blue contoured background with the figures standing in front of the straight white lines (last two images), maybe using gold leaf or even metallic ink (which would be cheaper) to add some additional interest. I’ve also put the darker figure in the background so that it gives the feeling of being in the shadows, even though, technically, lighter figures are supposed to recede, which in this case they don’t seem to because of the background.

So I’m sorted, apart from the fact that it will need to be a reduction linocut, something which I haven’t done before, put off by the suspicion that my brain doesn’t work in a reductive way, but there’s nothing like a challenge. Maybe I need a Plan B, just in case.

Water

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For the last couple of weeks we’ve been continuing to explore Turner in my painting class. The subject is water and stormy weather. As before, we’ve been applying thin layers of paint and sansador with a rag, and then applying several layers of glazing.

We started with a couple of small studies.

I used a limited palette of mineral colours – ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow light, burnt umber, alizarin crimson and titanium white. I’m not keen on it, it jars with me, in fact, I really don’t like it, but it meets the brief.

I much prefer this one – to me, it’s less figurative, although as soon as you put in a horizontal it automatically reads as a seascape. A post-Turner palette of cerulean blue, Prussian blue, phthalocyanine turquoise, cadmium free yellow, winsor violet and titanium white.

Then starting with an acrylic ground of a yellow grey, applied thickly and roughly so that definite brushstrokes are visible, I used the same limited palette of mineral pigments as in the first study.

It all started to become a bit twee, for want of a better word, so I blurred the horizon, and tried to break it all up, knocked it back and accentuated the sweeping brushstrokes in the ground using an ultramarine glaze. I feel better about it, but in retrospect maybe I should have done away with the horizon completely, as Turner tended to do, or maybe the horizon allows it some space? I think I need to put it away and reflect on it at a later date.

I’m conflicted; over the last year, I have found that I have been moving away from figurative work, particularly in terms of art that I like to look at, perhaps in an attempt to free myself. I’ve always taken the view that I attend these weekly classes because I like to explore different directions, and that there is no point just turning up and making what I want to make each week regardless. I try my best to complete the task, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult. Maybe this is a lesson for the future – of not always being able to make the work which I want to make.

Making Sense of Worth

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Yesterday’s session turned out to be quite timely for me.

We watched a video of William Kentridge’s Tide Table and part of an interview with him. He likes working with charcoal because it can be erased very easily, and speed of thinking is equal to the speed of drawing. This reminded me of paint being liquid thought (Elkins, J What Paint Is). Kentridge describes his work as being on a trajectory – a path followed, which finds structure and subject through being made.

Amongst other things, we considered what advantage exists in using material that changes easily, and what the advantages are of working in a fast or slow way? We discussed how working quickly can be more intuitive and stops the conscious mind from overthinking. In this respect, some expressed the opinion that work made in a short period of time does not have as much value as work which takes longer to make.

This is a concept that I have been grappling with for some time, in an attempt to shake it off (Dialogue I; Dialogue IV – I’m So Over It; We’re So Excited; Am I Bovvered?). It seems to me to be illogical, because I wouldn’t think that a book which took a year to write is of greater value than a book which only took a month. Maybe one author was in a flow state and it all came easily, whilst the other had to struggle, but theoretically they are of equal value.

What determines art’s worth? The time spent on it, the skill involved, the size, the materials used? Would a small piece using 24 carat gold leaf encrusted with diamonds which took me 5 minutes to make using quite complex skills be worth the same as something I took days to produce using a child’s wax crayon and a piece of scrap paper, but into which I poured all of my emotional being? I’m trying to bring myself over to the point of view that none of it matters; what matters is that I made it because I thought it worth making, and that it connects with me. But it’s very difficult to shift the mindset.

In my posts, which I refer to above, I was considering value in terms of rejection and how that might impact how I felt. I have the opposite scenario at the moment; I saw one of Rebecca’s blog posts about an exhibition she had been to, and I was intrigued by the technique used by the artist. I thought that I would quite like to try it out, and so I did. I made ‘Siblings’. It took me about 45 minutes or less to make. It didn’t take much skill to make – to be fair it could have been made by a primary school child with appropriate supervision while using the craft knife – but it represents and embodies something deeply emotional to me and it was very much about the process. As it turned out, I wasn’t disappointed with the end result and so I decided, on a whim, to enter it into the ING Discerning Eye Open Call, for which the deadline was the following day. It has been selected. You would think that I would be over the moon. I pretend to be to the outside world, but inside I still can’t help feeling that it’s unworthy because of the limited time it took to make.

Time Capsule

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She went back to uni today. She was looking forward to getting back to some normality and having independence again. The house seems empty – don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to suffer from empty nest, but there is a presence missing, along with all her stuff that seemed to have found its way into every single room of the house. The creation station that she had set up in the sitting room is no longer there – watching tv whilst she painted by numbers to try and occupy herself and at the same time rehabilitate her hand. And then the quilt, which she didn’t manage to finish before she left; she was disappointed because she wanted to have something to show for what she saw as having been a wasted summer. Never mind – she’ll complete it over the next few weeks, and it will serve as a reminder of ‘that summer’, imbued with fear, frustration, pain, resilience and hope.

It never ceases to amaze me how, in the act of making, memories and emotions are stored within the object, like a creative time capsule.

You’re Turning Into Your Father

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‘And what’s wrong with my father?’

’Nothing. But I didn’t marry him; I married you.’

It was our 23rd wedding anniversary yesterday. Neither of us is the same as we were 23 years ago and nor should we be according to K H Tan’s Fluctuational Identity Theory, ‘FIT’ (The Dissolution of the Self: How Ontological Instability Reconfigures Identity, Ego and the Nature of Selfhood, July 2025).

In his thesis Tan proposes a framework for understanding selfhood as a dynamic process of becoming that never achieves stable being. He argues against the notion inherent in Western traditional thinking that there is a stable foundation which grounds identity across time and change: a stable and unified self. This traditional way of thinking raises numerous fundamental issues eg how much change can happen before original identity is lost on a cellular and psychological level? When does the self come into existence? Conception? Birth? When does it come to an end? Brain death? Bodily death? It is not only incompatible with the dynamic, temporal and relational nature of existence, but our attempts to achieve a stable identity in an unstable reality could also be the cause of conflict, unhappiness, and the persistence of suffering in trying to control what cannot be controlled, the anxiety of trying to predict what cannot be predicted and the exhaustion of trying to maintain what cannot be maintained.

He is not promoting the idea of ontological instability per se, and he rejects the idea of chaotic instability (random fluctuations without pattern or direction) as these are incompatible with the coherence and continuity implicit in personal existence; we need to be able to recognise ourselves in order to be able to function. Instead he argues for creative instability. The self is not a thing that has experiences, but the ongoing process of experiencing the self; with every experience we integrate our past, our present and the possibilities of our future. It is a process of maintaining patterns while introducing variation and at the same time the self remains recognisably oneself while becoming other than what it was. The self undergoes ‘inter subject becoming’ – it is not a pregiven entity that enters into relations with others but emerges through and as a result of these relations.

He sees instability as a positive condition which encourages growth, creativity and meaning-making which would not be possible if the self were a fixed and stable entity. He considers fluctuational personas eg parent, friend, spouse, citizen, as genuine modes of being as opposed to roles and temporary performances, and as such negates the idea of authentic and inauthentic personas because all personas are genuine expressions of our capacity for becoming.

He advocates aiming for the middle ground. The more we try to define our identity the less capacity we have for growth and transformation, and too much self-awareness can lead to psychological overwhelm. Conversely, complete openness to transformation and abandoning any attempt to understand ourselves leads to a loss of any sense of identity and the continuity necessary for coherent existence, as well as disconnection from experience.

Achieving accurate self knowledge cannot as a matter of logic be achieved: we cannot bridge the gap between who we are and who we understand ourselves to be. He sees this area of misrecognition as being a ground for new possibilities of selfhood; it can become a creative force that helps us to become what we see ourselves as being. He gives examples of considering ourselves to be more creative, more confident than we are, and how this might lead to us ultimately having these attributes. Presumably the same could be said about negative attributes, but he doesn’t deal with these in any detail.

He compares traditional approaches and FIT in terms of personal development and growth including education and the effect of technology and algorithms on digital identity, psychological health, political and social implications, and human flourishing. He posits that FIT provides the framework within which we can better understand and navigate the challenges of contemporary existence.

It’s certainly an argument for revising the vows of marriage to reflect not only a change in financial status and health, but also in selfhood. Our wedding vows were in Italian and we haven’t the foggiest what we agreed to.

You Can Take The Girl Out Of Essex…

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So, you’re an Essex Girl!

No, I’m not from Essex (I’m not really from anywhere). A pejorative term used to belittle a certain group of women, used so much in everyday speech that it earned itself a formal dictionary definition: promiscuous, unintelligent, materialistic and lacking in taste. It was only 5 years ago that Oxford University Press eventually relented to a petition and agreed to remove the term from one of its dictionaries – the one used to teach foreign students English. A member of the Essex Girls Liberation Front, the campaign which spearheaded the move, is conceptual artist, Elsa James.

Elsa James (image: Tessa Hallmann http://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk 22/08/25)

Nowadays, I don’t really give two hoots. In fact, I often don the mantle and wear it with pride, even though it’s not really mine to wear. I still don’t understand why it’s the only county which has given rise to such a term of speech. Once you get out of ‘London Essex’ the countryside is beautiful, just like its neighbour, Suffolk, a landscape favoured by Constable, and the accent is so totally different from the stereotype.

I was in a local bookshop the other day and was looking at their maps when I noticed that they had a bundle of OS maps on sale, and, as if by luck, they had Landranger Map No 167 ‘Chelmsford, Harlow & Bishop’s Stortford’, so I bought it.

I lived in Essex with my parents on and off for about 12 years. I couldn’t wait to leave; it was on a road to nowhere and I spent the school summer holidays, which seemed to go on forever in those days, sunbathing in the back garden with cooking oil, reading Jilly Cooper novels and dreaming of finally breaking free and moving to London or somewhere else equally as exciting, perhaps one of the destinations of the planes that I used to watch leaving trails across the big blue sky.

I’m not sure why, but my old school isn’t on the map (the map is not the territory). It definitely still exists. It should be where the 08 is. I had to travel over half an hour on the 311 bus to get to school; the bus stop was right outside my house, which meant that rolling up my school skirt to make it shorter had to be done with expert precision as the bus pulled up at the bus stop, just in case anyone was watching. Then up to the top deck where you could smoke, with my small stash of cigarettes which I had pilfered from my father’s packet of Rothmans, left on the side in the kitchen.

It was an all girl school. There was a boys’ school across the road, KEGS, and in the fifth year there was a lunchtime club, Senior Christian Fellowship, to which the boys from across the road could come. It was the most popular club.

What has Essex ever done for us?

  • Grayson Perry went to KEGS: he left a few years before my time. He went on to do his foundation at Braintree College of Art. That’s where I wanted to go, but didn’t. We both got out, by different roads, and to very different destinations.
  • Ignoring the obvious ones, there’s The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Olly Murs, Jamie Oliver, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Damon Albarn, Richard Osman, and Robert the Bruce, amongst others.
  • Colchester is Britain’s oldest town.
  • It has the smallest town (Manningtree) and the largest village (Tiptree, home to jam-makers, Wilkins & Sons).
  • Southend has the world’s longest pier.
  • The world’s oldest wooden church is in Greensted.
  • It has 350 miles of coastline, second only to Cornwall, and the most islands of any county.
  • Chelmsford is the birthplace of radio.
  • The Mayflower was built in Harwich.

But even so, I still don’t think that I’ll ever go back and live there.

I’ve taken myself out of Essex…

Arachnid

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Whenever I go to B&Q, I always want to come home and do some DIY; whenever I visit a beautiful garden, I always want to come home and sort out our garden; whenever I go to an exhibition, I always want to come home and make.

I’ve been feeling in need of a pick me up recently, and so yesterday I headed into London on a hot, Notting Hill Carnival, Bank Holiday Monday to catch Louise Bourgois’ ‘Maman’ on its last day at Tate Modern, the very space for which it was commissioned back in 2000. There’s no doubt that it’s impressive at 9m tall – again, I ask myself whether it’s all about the size, but I think any spider larger than real life would have an impact. I had an overwhelming urge to touch it, but resisted in light of the ‘Please Do Not Touch Sign’. I also found myself wondering how they got it into the building, memories of Johnny Vegas’ struggles coming to mind.

It was well worth the trip, a rare chance to see a piece in the flesh in the very place for which it had been made. Having said that, I’ve seen some images of it in a landscape, which I find particularly effective.

Tate Modern’s website on ‘Maman’:

Louise Bourgeois started making sculptures of spiders in the 1990s. This version is her biggest spider. Its title, Maman, is French for mummy. The artist said spiders reminded her of her mother: ‘Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever … spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.‘

I’m a bit behind with things at home, and we’re starting to amass some really impressive cobwebs. I watched as a flying insect became entangled in one of them; in a flash the spider came from nowhere and quickly got to work wrapping it up.

I’m not sure that spiders are clever as such, but they do have great skill. I don’t really think of them as being helpful and protective: they set traps that you can’t see, they ambush you and then swaddle you up until they consume you. Although, I don’t have a problem with them, as they catch flies etc, as long as they are not where they’re not supposed to be, such as on the bedroom ceiling above my head, or in the bed.

Lifelong arachnaphobe, Primo Levi, in his essay ‘The Fear of Spiders’:

“The spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly and take us back to the impotency of infancy, subject us again to her power…”

I’ve tried not to be either of those spider mothers. I’ve tried not to be suffocating and I’ve tried to resist the urge to fix things. I’ve definitely failed; I often tell my daughter that I’m trying my best, and, when she’s older, not just to remember the times when I’ve not been at my best, like I seem to have done with my own mother. It’s that negative bias again, I suppose. I’m now actively remembering all the times when she was kind and caring, supportive, and all the laughs we had together, which by far outnumber the not so good.

Is It All In The Name?

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I watched a Channel 4 Documentary the other evening ‘Art, ADHD & Me’ with Johnny Vegas. It was five years in the making – during filming Vegas’ mental health declined, and he was diagnosed with ADHD.

It follows him embarking on a community public art project as a tribute to his home town, St Helens. His initial idea of a walkway in the centre of a busy square, designed to give a few seconds respite and space to think, was stopped in its tracks by the number crunchers – it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to realise. Whilst Vegas was going to have a fundraising exhibition of his work, it wouldn’t be enough. He had to come up with a plan B – a metal structure displaying tiles which forms a love letter to St Helens, and which is to be displayed at the World of Glass. The measurements were off and few of the tiles actually fitted when it came to assembling it. On opening night, Vegas is shown outside with an angle grinder trying to cut them down to size. He didn’t finish. It’s a work in progress.

It’s a programme full of vulnerability. I felt as if I was there with him, experiencing the self doubt as to whether he should go with an idea just in case there’s a better one he hadn’t thought of yet, feeling the frustration and disbelief when things didn’t fit, and the stress of time running out followed by the final acceptance that what would be, would be. It was interesting seeing how his mind works; instead of falling asleep, he wonders how many pigeons it would take to lift him up.

However, I did find myself wondering whether he would have been given the time of day by the Council, had he not been who he is.

I was walking through Winchester last week, past one of the two Castle Fine Art galleries in the city. I looked in the window and saw a 2D Johnny Depp looking back at me. I peered in and saw the far walls adorned with his work as well as a large photo of him in the act of being artistic. The gallery also represents Billy Connolly, Bob Dylan and Boy George. It seems that everyone’s doing it – just this morning I saw a post about Noel Fielding’s new exhibition. David Bowie did it, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards do it, along with Paul McCartney, Miley Cyrus, Pierce Brosnan, and a plethora of others.

My first thought is that it’s simply not fair – leave some space for the rest of us. Then I ask myself, why shouldn’t they be able to express themselves in the visual art world just because they’ve succeeded in another sphere? They should be able to, and some may have even started off in the arts – Vegas has a BA in Art & Ceramics – but their lives took them in a different direction. But I do wonder whether we would even see their work if they worked under a pseudonym.

Carbon Dating II

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In the words of Vinnie Jones: it’s been emotional.

Over the last 54 days I have been mapping my emotions each day, using orange for positive, green for neutral and blue for negative. At the beginning, I was going to use different shades of each colour but I soon realised that this would over-complicate things. I also realised that I needed to put some rules into place: I started each line from the dated contour line, drew for two minutes, trying to explore as much of the sheet as possible to achieve an even distribution of mark-making, and finished the line off the page. I wanted to make it so that theoretically I can pick any day and trace the line which represents it. I drew each line at the end of the day, and took a photo. Unfortunately, sometimes it wasn’t light enough and so I had to take photos including a number of days’ worth of lines, so instead of having 54 photos, I’ve only got 46 which has resulted in a sudden surge in orange lines towards the end – maybe I was enjoying the positive. They are not the best photos – the lighting is all over the place. Next time I do something like this I will try and make them consistent, although I do quite like the movement it creates.

What have I learnt from this exercise? Had I not done it and you had asked me what the last 2 months have been like for me, I would have said that they have been difficult, and that for the most part I have felt negative emotions such as sadness, grief, stress, frustration and anxiety. However, looking at the end result I can see that this isn’t actually the case; I can see that there are more orange lines than green, which in turn outnumber the blue. This must mean that I feel negative emotions more strongly than positive ones, and this results in my perception of life being somewhat skewed. The map reflects this, in that, whilst they are few in number, the blue lines jump out at me from the rest. I think the technical term is the negativity bias. I don’t think that I would have had the same result had I represented my daily emotions diagrammatically in a chart – it matters that each day is individually represented. Maybe there is another way of doing it – I’m just not a mathematician!

I found the exercise to be a positive one; the act of drawing a line each day not only meant that I was making, but it also allowed me to reflect on the day as I drew – a form of visual journaling. I enjoyed the process of it and whilst it can be said that the resultant map is interesting, what it reveals also became apparent during the process itself; as the map was becoming each time I engaged with it, so I was becoming.

As ever, I’m not sure how I can develop this, if at all. Or maybe, there’s no need. Today was the last day. I think I will miss doing it, so I might just continue.

Forget-me-nots

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It’s a long time since I last had a pet, and this may not be anything new, but there’s a business out there, maybe more than one, which is supplying veterinary surgeries with packets of forget-me-not seeds to send to customers whose pets have died. Since Monty died we’ve received cards of condolence from our regular vets and the specialist practice, both enclosing identical packets of seeds.

I will sow the seeds and hopefully next year green shoots will emerge from the earth, but with my gardening skills, I don’t hold out much hope.

I appreciate the thought, if it was indeed a thought, and not just a gesture generated automatically by an impersonal process. The cards contained messages from staff I didn’t even know were involved in Monty’s care; general messages of sympathy for our loss, except for one, which stood out because it described him as having been such a character. No sooner had Monty’s heart stopped beating than the vet’s hand was on my shoulder, followed by “I’m sorry for your loss”. Similarly, from the veterinary nurse who had assisted, with an added hug, whose eyes failed to show any sign of recognition a couple of days later when I went into the surgery to speak to her about our other dog.

I’ve decided that I don’t like the phrase; it’s trite and it doesn’t make the pain any easier to bear. In fact, I don’t think that I’m a fan of euphemisms generally, particularly, the idea of passing or passing away. Where to? My father died, my mother died, my dog died. That’s it. They didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t lose them, and there’s no chance of finding them again, and reuniting.

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in something else. Maybe I believe in the law of the conservation of energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Now, where are those forget-me-nots?