In yesterday’s session we looked at ‘thick description’ as opposed to ‘thin description’. Thick description gives extra information, creates a mental image, and prompts questions. Thick description is using language to expand understanding and allows us to recognise what we bring to it, emphasising that we are the makers of our work and we are bound into it. For me, this echoes material engagement theory: as humans we make things and are, in turn, made by the things we make.
We were given a few minutes to describe what was in front of us – the part that no-one ever gets to see on our Zoom sessions. I use my daughter’s bedroom whilst she’s at uni. I wrote down:
A sea blue wall displaying the boardwrapped with small, glowing lights – a showcase of scraps of paper arranged haphazardlywith multi-coloured pins, some images, some reminders of future tasks. Numerous containers with an assortment of writing materials; pens and pencils standing to attention, ready for action. The white desk with its marks of ink and nail varnish – traces of past actions of my daughter. It makes me feel connected. I sit where she sat. I feel her presence.
As I was writing it, I suddenly felt emotional – I don’t know where it came from – maybe because I was thinking in a sentimental way, and that became a release valve for the stress and tiredness that I’ve been feeling. Or maybe, despite my bravado, I just really miss her.
We went on to think about our own contact zones, and how we are influenced or changed by the contact, and how it impacts our work and the reason we make it. This discussion generated a whole host of different ideas. For me, it is about how they make me feel; I am influenced by contact zones that generate an interest, prod me and provoke a response from me, and I often put myself in zones which make me feel uncomfortable and challenge me, that take me out of my comfort contact zone. I am not sure that if my contact zones made me feel completely at peace and in equilibrium, with nothing to respond to or process, I would even feel the need to make art.
How do I feel about it? I’m pleased with how it turned out and I found it to be a rewarding experience – it has certainly made me think a lot more, and has been incisively relevant for my work.
This morning was a bit stressful as the broadband was playing up and I had some last minute changes to make and quite a few references to double check. It didn’t help that I was constantly switching between laptop and iPad because my laptop is so old that it turns out that it no longer supports the latest browsers. As a result, it was submitted a few minutes past the deadline, which has really disappointed me. Even more so, that when I’d taken a break and had another look, I saw a few incomplete references and other errors in the paper. Word blindness.
Previously, I have completed work with time enough left to review at my leisure, and so I’m wondering what went wrong this time. I certainly planned to have it completed with time to spare, and it’s not like I haven’t had since the Spring to do it.
On reflection:
I struggled for ages to think of a subject – I kicked the proverbial can down the road.
it took me a long time to work out how I could encompass the areas in which I’m interested – self, memory, mapping, and materials – into a cohesive and comprehensive research question.
maybe the scope of it was too much – it encompassed philosophy, psychology, cartography and cognitive archaeology. There was a lot to research to extrapolate relevant concepts. Whilst Perplexity helped refine searches, I still had to read all the sources eg material engagement theory was developed over a period of a couple of decades, through numerous published papers, and a lot of the sources were heavy and difficult reading, my aged brain not being able to digest and assimilate a vast amount of information anymore
I can’t multi-think the way I used to. I can only focus on one demanding mental load at a time otherwise I feel overwhelmed and can’t function
I didn’t appreciate the amount of work that was still to do after my last session with Janet. I was so relieved that my second draft had legs that I think I took my foot off the pedal and let other things get in the way, although I did make some work.
I think that I anticipated being able to really crack on in the last month but various things got in the way of this, feeling under the weather with one thing after another, and the print sale. I spent so much more time and mental bandwidth on that than I anticipated, but, it was a valuable learning experience.
This really does sound like a roll call of excuses, but at the end of the day, what’s done is done, and all I can do is try not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
The self is in a constant state of becoming, and each time we reflect, we create iterations of ourselves, crystallised in time; shadow selves. ‘Wayfinding’ – my first reduction linocut – evidences the processual nature of its making, with each layer being a trace of what was once, but is no longer, fixed in time and unalterable. It embodies how the act of making and the evolving self are intertwined, the self being both mapped and remade.
It’s been a steep learning curve, with highs and plummeting lows. I have learnt a lot from the experience – the physical process of the making of the prints, with its inherent breaks from activity, and the potential and restrictions of the materials themselves which have challenged me, requiring me to find solutions to the problems I have encountered along the way.
I liked the contemplative feeling of cutting the lino and the nature of rolling out the ink, observing its texture on the brayer akin to suede, listening to the sound of the brayer and ink sizzling, and the relief (or crushing disappointment) when pulling the print. I feel that the experience has enriched me and that hopefully I will continue to become a better printmaker – I don’t say that I have become a better printmaker because aside from possibly being factually incorrect, that indicates that my becoming has stopped – I want to be in the process of continuing transformation. The prints themselves evidence my learning and development in all their imperfection.
In his paper Making Hands and Tools – Steps to a Process Archaeology of the Mind (2021), Malafouris argues that ‘thinking is thinging’, in that we think with and through things, not simply about them, and that human becoming refers to the process of ongoing transformation that characterizes the human condition as indeterminate and incomplete, or else always about to become. As we engage creatively with the world, the new things we make shape our developmental pathways and our ways of being in the world and, as such, human intelligence is handmade.
’Hands and tools can be moved but they are not moving; it is the brain that moves the hand to move the tool. Taken together hands and tools can be seen as interactive processes. They co-constitute each other’s life by means of thinging. It is now the tool that moves the hand to move the brain because the brain is already attuned to the hand and the hand is aware and responsive to the tool. In one sense, the hand acts as for the tool, in another sense the tool acts on behalf of the hand or other tools…The agency of the hand derives from the tool and the agency of the tool derives from the hand.’
He asserts that hands and tools are made for action, in action. So my hand is made for action and without that action it is not a hand. I pick up the carving tool which is made for action and without my hand it is not a tool. My hand moves the tool to carve the lino and the tool responds to my hand at the same time as my hand responds to the tool. The lino responds to the tool as well as my hand, and in turn my hand and the tool respond to the lino. The lino is not lino without the tool and my hand to carve into it. My hand and the tool are not a hand and a tool without the lino to carve into, and so on. As my brain is in tune with my hand, then so is the carving tool, the lino, the brayer, the ink, and the paper, and, as such, they all influence my developmental pathways and my way of being (or should it be becoming?) in the world.
On reflection, I’m not sure that I enjoyed the process that much. The restrictions of a deadline, the specifics of size and number, the fact that it was being made with a view to being sold, all contributed to a feeling of unease and pressure. I much prefer experimenting with no expectation, focussing on the process, and not the product.
I thought about what size to do the print. If anyone buys it, I would like them to be able to frame it at home with a shop bought frame. So I needed to leave enough of a border so that it could go into an A3 frame without a mount, but not too much so that there is a lot of white space if they choose an A2 frame with an A3 mount. I decided to leave a 2cm border on the top and sides, and 4cm at the bottom.
I decided at the outset that I would not aim for perfection, that there are bound to be mistakes and that it should just be good enough.
It started off well. I made 12 prints
When I came to print the next layer of dark grey the registration of the print went awry. I went from feeling quite happy about the process to feeling despondent and frustrated. I made a few adjustments but it still didn’t work. So I stopped myself from ploughing on in the vain hope that doing the same thing again and again would somehow miraculously give a different result.
After some time away, it became obvious that the lino block, which had been washed and left to dry, was not sitting totally flat, which may have been the cause of the issue. So, I warmed it up and put it under a pile of heavy books whilst it cooled down. I came back to it a while later and tried making another print, which worked much better. Feeling a bit happier about things I went on and finished the rest of the prints. I must have inadvertently caught some of the cut out areas whilst inking up which caused some chatter on the base red layer (I clearly hadn’t taken on board the lessons from the first session) and on a couple of prints there was too much give in the blanket allowing the paper to be pushed down onto the cut out areas which caused marks on the red ink. This was resolved by adding in some folded newsprint which created some rigidity over those areas.
I liked the slightly mottled effect of the grey on the figures – it gave the sense of light falling on the figures or a lack of solidity. I wanted the head silhouette to be stronger so I burnished the head and the front side of the figure with a spoon to get a darker print. I liked the prints at this stage, but I felt that the two grey figures didn’t have enough definition between them, so I went on with the final gold layer.
So, Plan A was dependent on me being able to overprint the red with blue. I did a quick test print. The process blue ink I was using must have some transparency as it turned into a very dark purple, so I made it more opaque by adding opaque white which resulted in a kind of cerulean blue which I liked against the red, although the photos don’t do it justice.
I then prepped a sheet of A4 lino by lightly sanding and wiping with white spirit before staining it with an acrylic ink and drawing on the figures and the white lines. I went over the pencil marks with a chinagraph pencil to make them stand out more. As usual I had launched in without giving it enough thought and ended up having to reposition some lines although I couldn’t erase the chinagraph marks, which becomes relevant later on in the test printing. I used a metal ruler to cut out the white areas and filled them with cornflour to see how they looked, neatening up where necessary – the circles are bit all over the place, so I resolved to use a template when making the actual prints.
I created a registration board for the lino, drew lines where the paper was to go, and printed the first layer using equal parts process red and process yellow. Initially, I thought that I could mask out the figures using some tracing paper. Reduction linocuts work from light to dark ordinarily, but my image doesn’t really conform to that process. I knew one, if not two, of the figures would be a med/light grey and I wasn’t sure how that would sit on top of a bright red. I tried inking up whilst the mask was on the block and then removing it, but it was difficult to do because the mask kept on sticking to the brayer and the result wasn’t great. I decided to ink up the entire block for the rest of the prints. I also noticed that some of the chinagraph was coming off the block onto the prints.
Next, I cut out the contour lines and printed with blue ink. By this stage I had realised my previous error and masked the figures after inking the block, but before printing – a much better result, and I can’t work out why I hadn’t realised this to start with. However, after the first print it was obvious that the registration was off. I had thought that I had lined up the paper the same each time when I was printing the red layer, but I clearly hadn’t. I created a raised edge against which to place the paper on subsequent prints, but I had to accept that the blue and red layers wouldn’t line up on all of the test prints, which would cause problems in relation to the white areas.
There was also misalignment around the edges of the figures which could have been caused by poor registration on the first layer, but could also have been caused by a lack of accuracy in creating the mask, or even applying too much ink.
To complicate matters further, the paper I used was Japanese HoSho paper which being lightweight (90gsm) and strong makes it ideal for printing linocuts. However, it turns out that it is slightly smaller than A3. I already had some Snowdon 130gsm paper, so I thought that I would give that a go, to see if it would be a suitable alternative, even though it is heavier than the HoSho.
Other than a few areas where some bits had managed to get stuck onto the block, it seemed to print quite well.
I then cut away the rest of the block leaving just the figures. I wanted to experiment with both masking areas and inking up the whole block to see how the subsequent layers printed so I could decide on a final approach ie whether to use a mask or to layer the ink. I would have preferred not to mask any areas as it seemed to increase the risk of mis-registration of the print. But before I decided I needed to find out how the final metallic gold layer would sit on top of all the other layers. I noticed that there were some indentations in the outlines of the figures from where I had cut out the contour lines.
I also wanted to see how the grey would print on top of the blue as well as the red, and it seemed to fare quite well, although it definitely has a cooler undertone to it than when printed over the red.
The blue and grey layers seemed to dry slower than the red and, as a result, the dark grey/black ink didn’t print well, and also the cut away areas picked up some of some of the blue and transferred it to the prints. I had the same issue with the gold ink, but by that stage I had become a bit frustrated and impatient, and just wanted to see what the colours looked like together. There are agents which can be added to the ink to speed up the drying process but you have to be careful as to the amount used, as they can alter the colours. I could have swapped from oil based to water based inks, which I didn’t have. So I decided to make the best of what I had.
I know that I make things more complicated for myself than they need to be. I could have watched videos on how to make reduction linocuts before starting, but there is a part of me that thinks that learning on the job is a more valuable, if not more frustrating, experience, and that the lessons learnt are more likely to be remembered (and possibly put me off linocuts for good).
So, what did I learn?
Preparation is key
Registration is everything – I watched a couple of videos after the event and invested in some Ternes Burton registration pins and tabs
It’s preferable not to mask areas if possible but to cut away the lino on each layer
Don’t use chinagraph or anything else which could transfer from the block to the paper
Accuracy is important
I should have had a resolved image before I started, rather than winging it in the process
When cutting out the first and second layers I needed to ensure a clean edge with the figures by using a craft knife
I needed to check that there isn’t any ink on the cut out areas of lino before printing
The ink needed to be dry before printing the next layer
But, the most important lesson is that because of the number of layers and the time needed for drying, it would not have been possible to complete the print before the end of the month. I needed to go back to the drawing board and have less colours so that it reduced the amount of drying time etc. So I amended the image to just white, red, grey and gold.
From my lived experience; my past, my present, my interactions with the world and the people in it, a moment in time, what I read, hear, see, feel, smell and taste.
What do they look like?
A network or web where they interconnect, or wait to be connected.
What kind of a web is it?
A spider’s web. Some ideas are fleeting and wispy and drift away, whilst others are more robust and have some form.
Other’s ideas are like seeds which grow over time (akin to Bateson’s ecology of the mind in which, like organisms, ideas grow and flourish whilst others become extinct) which need to be cared for and nurtured, or a breeze or mist, pre-existing ideas waiting to be received.
Maybe the source of the idea depends on what interests you at any point in time. I’m interested in my experience of living in the world, and so I don’t think that my ideas pre-exist because they are bespoke to my unique lived experience. Often they are triggered by something, a reaction to something, and so they don’t often come to me out of the blue. They are a combination of everything and anything, but at their very basic I believe that they are a matter of neuroscience; the complex neural interactions between knowledge, memory, emotions, and experience, all being broken down and continuously recombined in infinitesimal permutations, consciously and subconsciously in dreams, flow states, and acts of automatism.
Just because they are bespoke to me doesn’t necessarily mean that they are original. Gompertz doesn’t think that originality in a completely pure form actually exists and that all ideas are additional links in an existing chain (Part One: Think Like An Artist). There are numerous quotes from creatives who have built on the ideas of others: Newton and the shoulders of giants; Jobs and stealing great ideas; Twain who said that all ideas are secondhand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
We then considered Brian Eno’s concept of the ‘scenius’ (a creative co-operative of intelligence) and the articulation of the ideas of the scenius by an individual who is then held up by society as being a genius. On reflection, I think that he is right to the extent that the genius is just the tip of the scenius iceberg, but that both should be equally celebrated, and the attribution of the idea should be shared. It’s not enough to have an idea – it needs to be acted upon and often this involves elements of risk, courage and persistence.
Undoubtedly, collective recognition encourages greater sharing of ideas and increased creativity. In this respect, the existence of a scientific scenius goes some way to explaining why two different people can come up with same idea at the same time eg Bell and Gray, who both came up with same idea of the telephone. But, the idea didn’t come from nowhere – the circumstances at the time were demanding a solution to an existing problem, and the latest scientific developments and knowledge in the field, which were needed to devise the solution, were already widely known and shared amongst the scientific community, to the extent that Gray and Bell had detailed knowledge of each other’s work. So really, it was just a matter of time before someone came up with it. Maybe to that extent, it could be said that the idea was in the ether waiting to be received by someone who was attuned and had the requisite knowledge to implement it.
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.
I didn’t expect to enjoy the Edward Burra exhibition at Tate Britain. His earlier works of figures in bars and cafés in France and the US were interesting, but I was particularly intrigued by his work during the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and his later work. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis as a young boy, and during the war his medication was subject to rationing which meant that not only was he isolated from his friends, but he was also in pain for most of the time.
He mostly drew from memory, and used watercolour to build up layers. They were extraordinary. They had the solidity of oil paintings, and yet had a remarkable quality of luminescence about them.
As he got older, and couldn’t travel abroad because of his failing health, he went on road trips with his sister, often accompanied by friends. When they stopped to enjoy the views he would just look, later recreating the scene months later in his work.
I then went round the Lee Miller retrospective which has around 250 photographic images on display. Originally a Vogue model, she moved from being in front of the camera to being behind it, working closely and experimenting with Man Ray in Paris. During the Second World War she was a war correspondent for British Vogue taking photographs of the Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
I hadn’t really been aware of Lee Miller before I went to see the film Lee, in which Kate Winslet plays her. At the end of the film, you see a selection of some of her most famous photographs including the one of her bathing in Hitler’s bath taken by her colleague, David E Scherman, as well as the scenes she witnessed at Buchenwald and Dachau, the mud of which is still on her boots which she has purposefully placed in front of the bath. Seeing them in the flesh, in a small side room, was incredibly moving. Not surprisingly, photography was not permitted in this part of the exhibition.
British Vogue was reluctant to publish her photos of the concentration camps, on the basis that people wanted to move on from the war, and whilst they published a few, American Vogue published a comprehensive spread of them in the June 1945 issue, including the most harrowing, under the title ‘Believe It’. Her work, particularly her war photography, was not widely known about until after her death when her son found her collection of photographs. She had given up photography, too traumatised by what she had experienced during the war, and taken up gourmet cooking.
I finished off the day by having a look around the general exhibition and came across the subject of one of my favourite Fake or Fortune episodes (other than Frink’s Warrior found at an Essex car boot sale), Emma Soyer’s Two Children with a Book.
I made a last minute decision to go to Tate Britain on Friday to see the Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra exhibitions before they ended yesterday.
I didn’t enjoy the Colquhoun exhibition as much as I was anticipating, and I think it was because there wasn’t much surrealism.
As I was standing in front of Scylla, a woman commented to me that she had been expecting it to be a lot bigger as it had been used so extensively in the marketing of the exhibition. I assume that she had thought that because the image was used for marketing purposes that it was an important work of Colquhoun’s and because it was important and of value, that it would be large in scale – the old perennial issue of size.
Scylla, 1938, oil on board, 91.4 x 61cm
‘It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath… It is thus a pictorial pun or double-image in the Daliesque sense – not the result of a dream, but of a dreamlike state.’
Colquhoun used the Surrealist process of decalcomania to produce a mirror image of randomly applied marks which she then used as a starting point for her work.
Gorgon, 1946, oil on board & its decalcomania counterpart of oil on paper
’I meant to paint a ‘Guardian Angel’ but the result of the automatism was so horrific that I had to call it a Gorgon instead’.
She also used a technique called parsemage, which involved submerging paper in water which had powdered chalk or charcoal on the surface.
These processes offered intuitive access to the unconscious mind, according to the accompanying blurb.
I decided to give parsemage a go – I think that you can do it with anything that can be ground to a dust – I used powdered graphite which has a slightly metallic quality to it. I was really pleased with the results.
I then remembered a post on Instagram of a potter decorating bowls by blowing bubbles. I’ve used bubbles in wet cyanotyping before, so I decided to try it with the powdered graphite. I really like the delicate lines which were created and it was fascinating watching the effect of the bubbles popping – it reminded me of looking at cells under a microscope.
I then experimented with acrylic ink – maybe I should have realised beforehand – but it failed miserably. I wanted to try again with a water based ink, but I couldn’t find them. It might offer a more effective way of creating something akin to cells, than my previous attempts, so I’ll try again when I eventually locate them.
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.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 