Interior illusions

Chris made this fabulous comment on my previous White Room experimentation: to look at Matisse and how he arranged objects in space.

And that's what I did. I swiftly made two (in)expensive book purchases... small format, b/w photos and a lot of text on

• Matisse's own writing about art and his art practice: Henri Flam's originally 1973 published collections of Matisse's writings: Matisse - On art (see google books here); and
• A small collection of Matisse's cut-outs with some commentary: Ralf Schiebler, Henri Matisse. Scherenschnitte, Schirmer/Mosel, 1994. (sorry, there's not really much to see about this book online.

So, I've been reading these books on my various journeys across Berlin's public transport system for the past week. I sought out the cut-outs for a variety of hunches: to flatten space, to simplify space and to make objects moveable - to be placed and shaped where one likes. In that, I explicitly ignored Matisse's numerous earlier paintings of decorative still life and the curious games he plays with them with the construction of space.

And thus I stumbled to the extraordinary end point of someone's extraordinary artistic career. Which clearly doesn't make for an easy starting point for someone else. And neither should it.

So: we need a series of diversions, complications and confusions if this is something to work with, on, besides.

Let's start with a couple of his cut-outs. Yes?!

Henri Matisse, The Heart, 1943,
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet vii, 44.5x67.3cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Note the limited colour scheme; note how the different forms do not touch each other; note that in print the depth of the collages is lost; note how the heart makes the rest of the construction fall out of place - passionately.

It's constructions of space by cut out - the practice of cutting shape into colour - there is little more direct in approach than how Matisse - so late, and after decades of searching - stumbles onto this new medium that in its simplicity provides such clear expression. Playfully innocent and all the same something to arrive at after years of searching.

Henri Matisse, Figures, 1944
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet ix, 44.3x67.1cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Positive and negative shapes, space; the frame is as important as what is (not) inside. And yet: the positive remains incongruent to the negative; the forms do not match; do not exhaust themselves in each other. Instead, they are subtly changed, amended, rounded, flattened; so: one is not the opposite of the other.

So, I'm standing on the sidelines and my jaw is dropping in awe.
Don't forget to breath, dear
... and now??

Weiss, weiss, weiss, das weiss ich

White room 1, mixed media collage on paper, 35x40cm

... white, white, white, that's what I know.

A room full of white floorboards, window frames, walls and doors. And a bit of orange and lime green.

A room in a flat full of history: of someone's ex-flatmate, of others' ex-comrade, of someone's ex-lover, and another ones ex-lover. Right in the middle of Kreuzberg and the lives lived here.

And still: the flat isn't lived in, noone's home other than temporarily mine. With all its history, memories and things. And the smell of current emptiness.

A room full of white. Obvious white. What's with the layers of it - the windows got painted, new layers on top of old ones. Will they hold? Will they peel away?

Thus: some cartridge paper, some glue, some tissue paper, some acrylic ink and a marker pen. For a start.

White room 1 (Detail), mixed media collage on paper, 35x40cm

Weiss, weiss, weiss, das weiss ich....

It's about experience and knowledge in the middle of interior still life. I am sitting on my new bed and marvel at the sights of whiteness, colour and their invisible connections to past and presence.

Next: better glue, more marker pen, more ink, other walls and windows.

No - I hadn't forgotten

... about all the found papers. Only got sidetracked by too many other things.

Remember? In May I optimistically announced that anybody who had any papers to send to me should do so URGENTLY as I wanted to finish the books before mid-July.

[Don't know what I'm talking about? Check this post here, or the Found Papers Project tag for a overview]

Well... nothing happened despite my optimism. Well, that's not true: I did get a number more envelopes in the mail. When I was in Berlin, I picked up a rather adorable collection, and for a weekend, everyone kept passing any sort of found paper on to me. Thank you, again!

So, I put them all on my floor last weekend, to kind of get me back amongst them to see what to do with them. I had a few ideas kicking about before I had left in June. But... hm... nothing happened. There were all these papers and I didn't have a clue! A couple of hunches at best but definitely not enough to run with them.

To get me at least slowly walking again, I've now uploaded the third book which is finished: well, cut apart, not strung together though. Compared with the two first ones, it's white and a bit sparse, but features some candle smoke, sand and some authentic dirt on the architect's plan.

I did a first trawl through what are somewhere in the region of 25 envelopes of different STUFF, and picked some bits and pieces from them. They are all kind of white too... maybe I'll stick with that non-colour for a bit...

Found Paper Project Book #3
Mixed media collage on board
45.5 x 9 cm, doublesided
[top row's the backside, bottom row the front]

Well, next weekend I can start walking faster, I reckon. Let's see where to.

Help... she's painting people

... even worse: small people.

In the close, Detail
Mixed media in small Moleskine

But thanks to Joan Eardley, I'm confident that a bit of over the top colour scheme along with collage will help me out with my poor people drawing skills.

This is a small detail (as in 3x2cm) of my entry into Lorraine's Moleskine. Theme: close. And playing to stereotypes, I'm sticking with a literal, physical Glasgow tenement close. Well, which is in fact a lot closer in many ways that are not literal, but that's by the by.

There is another detail in the Moleskine Blog, but I think that will be all the early gossiping you'll get about this one, until it's in Vivien's safe hands to post the whole sketch.

I think it's finished. But just in case it isn't, I'll put it to the side for a few days. It's fairly complex for a small Moleskine, so I'm sure I'll find a couple of things to play with when I look at it again.

The little child in a pram is in fact a steal straight out of one of Eardley's paintings... do you know which one?

Exhibition inhibitions

The road to the blue trees, 64x45cm
Acrylic and paper on board

This will be the most recent piece for the exhibition. I finished it last Saturday, and will drop it off at the framer tomorrow morning. I'm just waiting on a friend to drop all the small paintings off at my house tonight after she picked them up from the framer earlier today. All this coming and going... it's a nice set of tasks to prepare for the exhibition: quite clearly circumscribed, ticking off items on the list.

All the time I'm getting rather giddy. Giddy at the thought of what it'll be like to look at all these things that I did over the past months. They are usually stashed away in different places, happy to be pulled out into daylight once in a while. But all of them up against a white wall?? That'll be exciting, a bit scary, and rather exhibitionist. Well: it's called exhibition after all, isn't it? Hadn't thought of that one before.

Somebody had asked whether I was scared or anxious. That I'm most definitely not. It's a funny one: for my job I do a fair bit of public speaking, and if someone had told 17-year old Gesa that she would have to talk in public regularly for her job, she would have surely hidden behind the sofa (any sofa) and never surfaced again. So, that kind of publicity took me a long time to get used to (and it still scares me from time to time). But this one feels very different.

Maybe that's because it's about something that is finished, done. It's ready. Whereas public speaking is always in the making, there and then. But maybe, more simply, it's not something I have to worry about as my livelihood depends on it? I don't know. It definitely feels like a lot of fun. And that's good enough, I s'pose.

BTW, I think this is a painting I'm not quite finished with: still feels too precious to let go off, and I doubt that will have receded by next week... so it'll possible have a Not for sale sticker on it.

And just to clarify any confusions over dates and times for the exhibition which have kept changing (to do with changing messages over opening times after everything seemed clear for a long time)

The Opening will be on Friday 13 June 4-6pm

From then onwards, the exhibition will be
open Monday to Friday 10-5pm (last entry at 5);
It will not be open at any point during the weekend.

The exhibition will close on Friday 27 June 5pm

The location is St Andrew's Gallery, Level 5, St Andrew's Building, University of Glasgow,
11 Eldon St, Glasgow, G3 6NH (off Woodlands Roundabout)

The website http://eldongroup.ghelms.com is being kept uptodate.

Almost there with the Found Papers Project

The most recent envelope I received for the Found Papers project is stretching my imagination: a board and plenty of playcards from a children's boardgame which looks like a couple of decades old; the dried pink petals of some spring tree blossoms and plenty more to get excited about.

I am trying to finish the project before mid-July. In order to do that, I've been asking people to send me any more found papers by the end of May. This should give me enough time to finish a few more books: there are some ideas for printmaking, said flower petals and quite a few more bits and pieces that are here already.

Here's a peek into the envelope above. You see my excitement?



Not quite? How about now?

Doing collage and thinking collage

FPP#3 WIP , mixed media collage on board
45.5x9cm
[if you follow the link,
click at 'all sizes' above the photo to see a close-up]

I had just uploaded my most recent Found Papers book to Flickr earlier on when I stumbled across a recent post by one of the collage artists that I had discovered over the past few months. Neda at Papiers Colles does collage that stay with me quite some time after I leave her blog: they are often composed of female figures, difficult, intense and haunting. The compositions are striking and - working much more conceptually than I do - of a clarity that really gets to me.

One of her recent posts spelled something out that I had only in passing picked up: she explored - inquisitivly and carefully - the differences between collage and scrapbooking. In so doing, she put a name to something that had rummaged (if not loudly so but persistently) in my own mind since I've been exploring and seeking out collage artists.

It is the link to avantgarde (however awkward that term may be) that makes collage an art form that was fought over, experimented with and thus often outwith mainstream art. The one collage book I bought a while back has some intriguing collages in it which include fumage - the technique of using soot - of candles, lamps etc - to leave marks on paper. While I couldn't find anything online about the artist - Banerjee - I did find plenty on the technique. Always in the context of surrealism and experimental automatic techniques with which the meaning of art was pushed to its boundaries, transcended or just to have had fun with (taking the piss would be the Glasgow phrase for it).

• See, here, e.g., something on the techniques employed by the artist Ithell Colquhoun
• Or, here, the Wikipedia entry on surrealist techniques

And while I am getting rather conscious of me turning into an art snob at this point: I wonder if it's not the curiosity, inquisitiveness and love of experimentation that makes art? Well - I suppose much of that has to do also with creativity, doesn't it - have a look at Neda's post and the many comments on what matters to her readers.

For those precious found papers

... there are image transfers.


In one of my recent envelopes I received something too precious to cut up, glue on and paint over. It's a handwritten letter from my friend's gran. I think I'm getting very sentimental about things like that, in particular since I have only one grandparent left (who incidentally doesn't write letters but talks on the phone once in a while).

I did a big of digging around - remembering that much of mixed media and altered media works with transfers - image transfers with gel medium, alcohol or various other ways - not dissimilar to monotypes in printmaking.

So, I scanned in the letter, printed it on ordinary paper, treated the surface of the receiving paper with some acrylic gloss medium, positioned the print out onto it, used the back of a spoon to burnish the paper thoroughly before starting to peel off the print slowly.

There are various posts - some tell you to remove the print before it's totally dry, others want you to wait til it's dry - the paper separated quite neatly to leave the ink printing on the receiving paper. Some of the stuck on paper can be peeled off carefully once the medium has dried. But it requires some experimenting with best times, best effect etc. And once finished and dried should be sealed with some acrylic medium before proceeding further.

Transferred onto the prepared collage background.
Left the original plain paper, right the collage piece with
two layers, one in black and one in blue -
I'm pleased that the blue transferred quite strongly too,

I actually liked the effect of some transfer paper remaining stuck.

This plain paper transfer is a really simple technique - it produces a soft type of transfer but even for writing it seems to work to the extent that I was looking for.

Here are some useful posts and sites I've come across in the process,

• starting with the WetCanvas post on image transfers here
• the plain paper transfer is taken from this site here
• and Toni's A Spattering blog has a couple of further useful posts on transfer techniques here

Using the project for this kind of technique explorations is really good fun: it's plenty of reason enough to try out some of the more involved collage techniques as well as to push what particular media can or cannot do. - Otherwise it would be too much of an assembly line of artist books, anyway, wouldn't it.

Maybe you want to know, but I've now received twelve envelopes with various bits and pieces of recycling from Chicago, Ayrshire, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glasgow, Newcastle (Australia), Jerusalem, ... and I've been told there are more in the post from Jerusalem (again), Birmingham and Sunderland... very good. I probably need a bigger box for the envelopes soon.

Found papers update: Prototype

The actual book with cover

I've got a prototype for my found papers project. It took me a while and several iterations to come up with a format that I felt would work and would reflect the idea of found papers from different place and people - if you want to check back to the start of the project, read this first post, and check out the tag Found Paper project.

The whole collage: Top row is the back, bottom is the front,
each side measuring 39x9cm
[Click on the photo to see more detail...
Blogger wasn't playing ball with this one]

So, after roadtesting a variety of glues, sealings and varnishes, here is Found Papers Book #1.
I will say a bit more about format, cover and general craftiness involved in one of the next posts, but it's too late for that tonight.

Found Papers Project Book #1, Card 1
6.5x9cm

Thus, only briefly: a couple of snapshots, and a lazy link to some more in this Flickr set.

And inside: the palm leaf book form - though not terribly neatly laid out

Alternative supports

I've been receiving a few more envelopes stuffed with found papers - more on the content of these in one of the next posts, and a big thank you to those who have been sending material along!

Since my little lunchtime conversation on 'what's to do', I've been thinking around these collages from allover. And... kind of got stuck with content. Shifted sideways (mentally at least), and started thinking about form - one of my stumbling blocks had been the two dimensional support: canvas, paper. It seemed far too unified, homogenous and definite for the idea of getting incidentals from different people in different locations.

One of the recent posts I really enjoyed was Lindsay's report from her bookmaking course, and the concertina artist book she made around the word 'reiteration'. I had been collecting ideas on customising and making sketchbooks for some time (thought they haven't progressed further than a draft state so far).

So, some concerted googling and asking around - thank you Lindsay! - unearthed a couple of simple bookmaking ideas. Unsurprisingly, many on crafty sites for projects with kids.

I had a go at some simple designs from Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord's site http://makingbooks.com

And ended up with these three ones here: A palm leaf book in the front, the hotdog booklet back right, and an accordion book back left.



This is them unfolded:



And, I must admit that my favourite is the palm leaf: as with the accordion design, it can be folded flat, but in addition, the order of leaves can be swapped around (provided the cord is long enough), and it can easily be taken apart and reassembled.



So: next step: size, actual support material and so on and so on...

Found papers. Someone's #2

Here's another lot of found papers...

In fact, they were the first ones I received... They had been sitting on my kitchen counter for a while now. I keep taking them out of their envelope, look at them, arrange and rearrange, and arrange again.

I do like the eating options on the back of one museum ticket. And I do like the 'engineering wonder' of another.

I wonder though if I will beyond beyond this feeling that they all are just far too precious to use up? LOL - I'll wait and move them around for a little longer, I suppose.

In the meantime: if you have some found papers, you want to send me, see the original post here, and send me an email and I can send some further details.

Found papers. A bit of art history

Merzmalerei was the term the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) gave to his assemblages and collages. Merzmalerei - a wonderfully lautmalerisches word. Apologies: I'm too lazy for the dictionary: it's one of those words that is 'painting with sounds' - is expressive just by the sounds it makes.
Merzpaintings - its origins seem to lie in one of Schwitter's early found papers - the cut off of a Com-merz-bank notice.

Schwitters lived in Hanover - the shopping destination from where I grew up. And the nickname Hangover gives an indication what me and my friends thought about the city back then. So, I probably will have seen some of his collages on school trips to the local museum. But I will remember to make time to go and visit the Sprengel museum again next time I have some time.

Schwitters was loosely associated with the Dadaist movement, but living in provincial Hanover provide plenty of insulation from it all the same.

One of the collages which inspired my found papers project is this one:

Kurt Schwitters, Aerated viii
1942, found and prepared papers and oil on canvas
49x39cm
The Art Institute of Chicago

I also came across this wonderfully eccentric account of how teachers in the 1970s would introduce students to Schwitters's art of finding papers:

'Kurt Schwitters was a primly dressed man in white shirt with starched collar and dark suit who would ride his bicycle through Hanover; now and then he would stop to pick up a tram ticket and many a different thrown away bits and pieces from the gutters; he would wander through the woods and collect sticks; who would tear up newspapers and decorate postcard portraits with spectacles and moustaches; who would take barbed wire, oil filters and shoe polish and would glue everything into his paintings'

• With this quote taken and translated from this website, go and have another look at the many Merzpaintings he made.
• there is also the Schwitters foundation, here
• and someone on Flickr collaged a hommage stamp to Schwitters. You want to see it? It's here
• finally, here's a general google image search on Kurt Schwitters

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Found papers. Someone's #1

My internet was off yesterday and I scared myself about just how put out I was by that... In any case. I've been getting a few promises for found papers - and it's interesting to see the kinds of associations people have offered up in response to my project call.

Here's a first lot of findings - a bit of bookkeeping, a bit of coach driving and some scribbles on papers...

I've made a box for collection, and ideas and thoughts are rummaging around in there and in my head as to where this may go.

Thank you, M.!

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Getting going...

wonderful... so the first responses are back: and I'm looking forward to post from New Zealand, Chicago, Jerusalem, Belfast, Kreuzberg, Goettingen and Uelzen... How nice. I'm particularly pleased about the last one: there is effectively only one person I'm in touch with who lives where I grew up other than my parents - hi Toja! - and I haven't really been in touch much of late. So, this has already been good. Any body else?

This is going to be an interesting one - I think I'm not much of a collector - well, I do have plenty of things that remind me of people and places but it's not really paper stuff I collect. And I think I need to learn collecting scraps of paper and bits and pieces again... Similar to how painting teaches me to see and experience the around me differently, this collecting project will do something similar.


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Found papers. From somewhere. Project

Detail, Water spray and a low sun,
mixed media collage on paper

Yesterday's mail brought a lovely surprise: Lindsay had sent me the first installment of found papers from her day-to-day. I had mentioned to her an idea for a project that had been rumbling around my mind for a wee while: doing collage as in glueing paper onto paper is even more fun if the paper glued onto each other is found, not bought - found papers are those stumbled upon, incidentally or even accidentally - and most of Picasso's and Braques's papiers colles and Schwitters's Merzmalerei assembled such found papers.

With many of my friends and colleagues scattered across Europe and further afield, I wondered if they would not send me some found papers from their day-to-day lives - Found papers. From Somewhere.

Found papers could be tickets, sweet wrappers, flyers, beer mats, posters, - whatever can be easily posted, isn't bought for its own sake, and could be glued onto something else...

Lindsay's mailing now prompted me to finally pull these ideas together, to make up a small flier and to send it to the people I know elsewhere.

Similarly, if you're reading this and would like to be part of it, just drop me an email - see address on the sidebar and I could send you some more details.

The plan is to collect found papers over the next few months and then develop them into a series of collages - I don't have a much clearer idea than that at the moment, but am sure it'll develop - most art projects do that.

Detail, Water spray and a low sun,

Mixed media collage on paper

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Plan no 2

Part of plan 1 - a week up far North West Highlands in late-September to paint in oils with David Tress has already been scuppered due to slowness in decision-making on my part [the course is already fully boooked], I thought I'd write a bit more about plan 2 - mixed media and line work... and make other plans for a glorious highland/island summer holiday...

Using the sketchbook much more extensively over the past six months has been really good, not just as source of inspiration but also as a more sustained focus on lines and markmaking with drawing media. The line drawings in December have gone towards addressing my hangups about drawing trees - btw: thank you to all of you who've left such nice comments of late :).

So, one thing I want to do more of is using paper-based works in a way that becomes more minimalist - if that makes sense. The quick sketches out in the fields where a first attempt of that and while part of it is the time constraint, I also very much enjoyed the indicative, subtle and ambiguous type of marks left. I want to explore that more, and also the extent to which collage can facilitate this - as in: do more so that it becomes less, or: how little can you do to get more...

This may sound far too woolly and mysterious but I think it's a plan that is only becoming formulated - in the meantime, it'll be about drawing and markmaking - I hope to find something in the way of life classes to help me in this too, but that'll be later on in Spring, I think.

So: as a starter a limited palette ink drawing with a bit of collage.

Fields study, Ink and collage on paper, 28x21cm

And: I had to laugh when I went shopping for my missing oil colours - excited to find the missing essentials I spend a lot of money on: yellow, red and blue - my friend to whom I paraded my acquisitions on Monday did look a bit perplexed about my excitement with these very plain choices.


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Collage with architecture

Crail Collage,
Mixed media collage on board x3
each 18x26 cm

Last weekend I had started to try out how small and complex mixed media collages would work with townscape scenery. The approach to make tissue paper bond with wide open spaces seems to work quite well, so I thought I'd try and see how well it works with some of my sketches of narrow cobbled streets, quaint houses and a scenery which seems to call much more for a tight drawing or at least wash and pen approach.

I seem to have been moving to smaller paintings: while before a lot of the pastels were around 70x50 cm, much of the mixed media works took place on smaller formats: 30x40 cm, or 30x30 cm. Part of that move was down to me seeing them simply as try-outs and studies. Another part was trying deliberately to sort out complex compositions to something simpler and tighter - small formats seem to enforce some discipline in that sense.

Stairs,
Mixed media collage on board
18x26 cm

So, these three mixed media collages are pretty small: about 26x18 cm or 10x8". With such small format I was somewhat apprehensive if the architectural scenes would work - in particular with the collage and mixed media - if anything these would loosen the painting rather than tighten it. It took several rounds and layers of crayons, tissue paper, acrylics, gouache, oil pastels, and ink. But I thinks they are pretty much done now? Or aren't they?

BTW: Casey, many thanks for suggesting these as a subject to work up - otherwise, I probably wouldn't have gone back to them so soon! And, these are for the PIF which I'll post out once I'm back from Germany.

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Bits and Pieces Collage Workshop: write-up

Sanna Head, Ardnamurchan Pen and ink on paper (24x30 cm) (week two)

The last session of the workshop alongside the Joan Eardley exhibition had been last week. And while I had posted the most recent collage from that session (here), I wanted to write a bit more about the workshop itself.

It ran for four session of 2.5 hrs each. We had begun each session with a tour around the exhibition, focusing on a few aspects of Eardley's work and in particular her work process.

Week One provided an overview of themes, approach and a closer discussion of her paper-based works: gouache, pastels and pen and ink; on the basis of this, we started doing stick and ink drawings of photographs of children. These, in turn acted as starting point for some simple collage of urban landscape and children's faces/figures - working with simple materials such as sugar paper, newspaper and oil pastels.

Pen and ink with pastel drawing 24x30cm (week one)

Week Two concentrated on landscapes: her landscape paintings, how she added and included mud, grit and grasses to achieve textures and the importance of composition within these. The activities themselves were again twofold: pen/stick and ink drawings of landscapes to bring out textures, vary these textures to strengthen the composition of the overall scene; we then prepapred with acrylics a number of papers - with various textures, tones and values as basis for the following week.


.... which I unfortunately missed. It included a tour around her seascapes and the assemblage of a whole series of impressive landscape collages which you can see in the photo. Secondly, people worked with soft pastels on sandpaper to develop colourful childrens' portraits.

Landscape collages and childrens' portraits (pastel on paper) (week three)

I will actually write about the last and final session later: I want to include some more of Eardley paintings in this as well as some of the various points I took from the sessions. So: more to follow...

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All collaged out...

... was what Irene called me this morning. It was the last session for this term of our Saturday morning class, so as of next week I can have lie-ins on Saturday morning (and longer Friday nights).

I finished two more of the desert landscape mixed media pieces by introducing some more collage, alongside acrylics, gouache and pastels. Similar to the first piece of the series, I worked with some smaller detail scenes rather than the whole motif I initially planned.

The easier piece first: Easier since it seemed to work straight off in terms of composition. But, that's possibly also a bit of its weakness (as so often).

Colored Sands Series #2,
Mixed media collage on board,
30x30cm

The second piece kept talking back at me that (a) its composition wasn't right, and (b) that I just can't do trees. Fullstop.

Colored Sands Series #2,
Mixed media collage on board,
30x30cm

We took it to the hallway, and Tom, Irene and I did a good crit session. For them, the spidery shape in the front provided just the kind of ambiguity to make the piece work beautifully... that much for my obsession with trees...

Oh, and then we discussed plans for a group exhibition in Spring, which would be fantastic, in particular with us exhibiting together. We'll discuss this early in the new year. Very good.

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Children playing in a backcourt

Backcourt and skipping rope,
Mixed media on paper
24x30cm

Without too many words this morning: this is the final piece I did in the Bits and Pieces workshop which was running in conjunction with the Joan Eardley exhibition. A streetscene with cut out figures of children playing in acrylics, oil pastel, ink and collage.

I'll be writing more about the workshop at some point over the weekend. But at the moment I am smiling to myself as the 'contour drawing' of tearing out shapes with paper seems an easy and little scary way of starting to put people into my work... will continue with that.

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