I wish I was

ACEO Colored Sands #9,
Watercolour on Paper

... a synesthesist.

To hear colour, or to taste words. But above all I would love to see music in colour. Wouldn't that be great?

Not about translating, transferring or changing state from one sensation to another, instead they are the same. They don't exist without the other... Hm, thinking about it, I am not sure if I cared enough about tasting words or sounds - too much bad taste.

But the music/colour assemblage would be fabulous.

Have a look at Philip Schreibman's Gallery to see (hear?) what I mean:

Or, similarly, the Belgian Synesthesia Association on Art and Synesthesia


And then I wonder: how would I know if I were? How do I know what it is that I experience?

Dance, dance, dance

Lykke Li Dance Dance Dance (Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 7 May 2008)

From gigs to themed Moley's... here's a glimpse at my work in progress on David's moley...

Last weekend's gig, last night's music and today's idea. There'll be a bit more on colour, paint and music.

Now I just need to figure a way to make those small pages large again.

On accidental loss

There's been an expression popping up throughout a number of discussions between Casey, David, Brian and others. I think it was Casey who named it first: in order to finish a painting one has frequently to 'kill the precious thing'. The one that you keep closest, most valued within the painting is so often precisely the one thing that stops you from finishing.

It's something I know too well: again and again I find that it is precisely the object, line, colour that drew me to that particular scene or composition in the first place, that proves later to be the weak point, the nag, the problem. It's a funny one. So, in many ways I wholeheartedly agree with this proclamation.

But, then again: to KILL it? My mind kept going back to it - and I also see that Casey refers to the messing up of a new truck rather than death. My mind kept wandering to some of the collage work I've been doing. The beauty of collage, as well as pretty much all other art is, that stuff, mistakes, failures do get lost: they submerge, recede in the background, become unnoticeable. Yet, all the same, they remain - and I think they do so very much being alive and not as corpses.

So, my proposition is on losing rather than killing. And I've got a good quote to give you a sense of what I mean. It's one that's been keeping cropping up in my academic work, and while I have difficulties with the sense of solidity it conveys, it - on one level or another - gets me to where I want to: lost.

"I wanted to see Kafka’s tomb. Knowing perfectly well (having verified it so many times) that you cannot see what you want to see, I went to the cemetery to see what I could not see. It’s the law. All is law. It’s because of desire. The law makes its nest in the peels of desire. Go on: you will not enter. If you did not desire to go, there would be a chance that the door would open." (Cixous, H. (1997), ’Attacks of the Castle’, in Leach, N. (ed.) Rethinking Architecture, London, New York: Routledge; p.303.)

Fields in Blue, WIP Detail
Mixed media on board, 50x35cm

One v many

A follow on from the previous two on canvas making and serial production.

When I had made the canvasses last week, I made a few at once. It makes sense once you got going to do so: not much cleaning inbetween, etc. On Saturday, however, I only took one with me to the studio.

There was some deliberate logic behind it. That logic went along the lines of: take your time, dear, just keep working on one and not on several at once. Part of that logic was trying to be more thorough, another part was my apprehension to another round of friendly jokes at 'Go, Gesa, Go!' as I'm - maybe except Chris - the only one in the group who works on more than one painting at a time. In fact, several do work on the same painting for 8 or ten weeks. I simply don't.

The road to the blue trees, WIP, Mixed media collage
70x50 on board, Detail

I work on the same theme for a long time. I also do a whole number of colour, composition and value studies of the theme for ages before I start painting. But when I start painting, three or four paintings at once just about feel right.

And you know what: I should have stuck to that. Should have taken the other canvasses with me, too.

So, slowness is part of it, but in a kind of not very obvious way - it's the slowness on working towards the oil paintings through pencil, ink, gouache and acrylics; it's also a slowness in going back to the painting several weeks after I last touched it. But that's combined with a distinct and deliberate moving quickly between different paintings in one session.

What does that result in? I don't know, but it feels right. It feels right as it makes each painting less precious, less singular and thus possibly more spontaneous? It means I don't worry about whether that line is right, that value is spot on or whether that mark is precisely the way I want it. It becomes clear in a muddled kind of way.

So, one v many is quite possible one in many.

Series production

or is it: serial or serious?

I have just been typing a lengthy comment in response to Yellow and Lindsay's comment on the difference between collage and scrapbooking, when I thought I should just write it up as a new post.

So, here's some more thoughts on creativity and generic commercials.

Some of the issues that I had been wondering about to do with creativity is the slap-dash approach to produce many of the same paintings, cards, collage to flog them successfully. - My adventures into the depth of Etsy, and even more Ebay, quickly take me to sites that do exactly that.

The funny thing is that I often work in series, do several variations of the same theme - early ones are the Bedrock and Clouds paintings; and just yesterday I realised that I must have done the four scenes of the fields at my parents' place well over thirty times since January - in sketches, pen and ink, acrylics, oil, collage, gouache and pastel. So, there's plenty of repetition.

In particular now that I've found my abstract shapes and lines in the compositions, it doesn't take me long to divide up the canvas for that composition, go on to fill in colours - and then... hey - is it still there? The IT being elusive, the non-mechanic, the bit that makes it work. Or probably: the bits (plural) that still make it work, the mix, the dynamic.

The road to the blue trees WIP, Mixed Media Collage,
70x50cm on board, Detail

But then again, in many ways, it is the mechanic, the non-thinking that is important and helpful - to get to somewhere accidental and incidental amongst all the purpose and intention.

So, it's not really straightforward with the IT, is it? Just as well as that there's nothing wrong at all with decorating ones diary, making greeting cards etc. - do that myself, too.

...

Ach... it still verges on elitist posturing but I think I'll keep trying for some more explication on this.

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.

Seasonal gagetry

... dodging the promised painting tutorial, I've been looking for interesting new blogs and in the process came across blogthings.com - a site full of funny, pointless and cute little quizzes.

One of them reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend a few days back. I was mourning the disappearance of summer (which at least here never really was at all - and that is even accounting for the general lack of summer in West Central Scotland) - she insisted that I was an autumn person in any case, so I should look forward to the coming months.

Quite funny, these classifications, aren't they? To be honest, I would have trouble identifying my favourite season - I usually find that once it's time, I usually enjoy it and find plenty good stuff whenever - be it spring, summer, autumn (maybe in wet, windy winters less so).

In relation to art, I've been thinking about different colour palettes for different times, seasons and places - how it took me time to get a sense of the desert in spring palette and more recently the outdoor painting in Scottish summers. Here, the freshness of spring contrasts nicely with the rich red-orange-greens of autumn, late summers. I've also picked up on how the sky is changing in hue and 'feel' as the year moves on.

In any case, back to the light entertainment of blogthings: which easily and decisively settled the question over my seasonality ;)

You Are Fall!

Thoughtful Expressive Creative Poetic Smart

What Season Woman Are You?

I also very much liked and laughed at the following ones:

Which carnival ride are you?

What muse are you?

And, not to forget: a quick way to discover your hidden talent.

Have fun!

In the zone...

Garden door, Crail, Mixed media in Sketchbook, 14x21 cm

Earlier today, a colleague mentioned how he'd been sketching while on holidays and how relaxing he found it just to focus on one thing at a time.

This feeling of 'being single-minded' resonates with my own thoughts on sketching. In fact, it was the recent class on reflective surfaces that reminded me of it: loosing myself in the observation of one object, its details, and how in turn these details make up the object and the scene.

There are many blogs and sites on the web that discuss sketching, keeping sketching journals and many of them discuss this simple beauty of making 'Travels with a sketchbook' (as Katherine Tyrrell's blog is called).

'Travelling' both literally and metaphorically is a good point here: while sitting still or standing to take in the scene and to get down a sketch, our eyes are all the same busy with watching, looking and our mind is busy making sense(s) - and so are our hands with pencils, graphite or other tools.

Here are a few recent discoveries of sketching/drawing blogs:

• See.Be.Draw
• Laurelines
• Jana's Journal and Sketch Blog

'Flow' is the term used in psychology on this sense of absorption and interest created by a challenging and interesting task. See here for some elaboration in a Wikipedia entry. And below are some examples of my own flow when sketching (all mixed media in sketchbook, 14x21 cm) in Crail - a very cutesy fishing village in Eastneuk:

Jam making and creativity

... yesterday's post on how to find subjects to write about is still rippling through my mind. At lunchtime yesterday I had bought a pound of raspberries and greengages. Raspberries in particular have become the fruit of summer for me since I moved to Scotland: so many of them are around and for such a long time that I do on occasions stop minding too much rain.

A fews years ago, when I was finishing my PhD in geography and got exhausted from the sheer endless writing up of all those pages and the constant skintness, I started making jam. My grandparents had an allotment and there would be so much jam made and fruits bottled, similarly, many of my friends would try out new recipes for all the strawberries, currants, plums and so on in Germany. Making jam - if not having a garden - was a way of being closer to them, but also something practical that I really longed for. Subsequently, my shelves - and those of my friends here - got filled with all sorts of jam creations (mind you, that grape and red wine jelly was rather disappointing).

I haven't made much jam in the past few years - I actually rarely eat jam in the morning and there's only that much you can give away. But the practicality of something other than thinking/writing academically was absolute joy - in the process I tried a variety of other things, such as knitting and crochet. While they open up a number of possibilities, their creative potential seemed however rather limited - in the end, the jams I kept liking most and making again were redcurrant, plum and raspberries - so, nothing fancy at all.

Do you see where this is going? When I started drawing, the technicality of the tutor's instructions was easy enough to follow but it took a good few more rounds of being lost and starting to do things differently and 'just try this and see what happens when I do this' for me to get a sense of the endless possibilities and openings of painting and art in general.

This looks like a post that I will be coming back to. But in the meantime, here is a link to a blog which has a whole series of interesting thoughts and commentaries on creativity Libzoid is by Libby Mills, an American artist who works with polymer clay. I enjoy visiting her blog to get pointers on work process, inspiration alongside a commentary on a medium I know very little about.

In the meantime: This is what I had for breakfast

Greengage (Mirabellen) and raspberry jam

500 g raspberries
500 g greengages, finely chopped
500 g 2:1 jam sugar

Mix all in a large pot, mash the fruit up thoroughly and let sit for a couple of hours
Bring slowly to the boil while stirring

Let cook for at least 3 minutes
Fill in sterilised jars immediately and seal.

Keeping writing... keeping painting

WTTS #13, mixed media on WC paper, 5x8cm


Since I started writing here, I've come across an increasing range of other blogs - many of them are fascinating and the ability to go back frequently to see new posts and comments has been a true insight for a new use of the internet that I did not appreciate beforehand.
One post I came across today and which perfectly brought up a number of issues relating to writing entries on the blog is on Katherine Tyrrell's Making a Mark blog.
In Making a Mark: How do I find things to blog about? Katherine offers a detailed list of how to find topics to write about, how to organise ideas and entries. I had to smile particularly at her suggestions that, when one starts one wants to present all knowledge in one go - rather than breaking it up and organising it more sequentially, narratively - I perfectly remember the desire to have everything on the page at once without much patience of letting things build up. Partly, that probably came from a bit of anxiety and apprehension that I would run out of things to say.
Reading Katherine's post however, made me understand more clearly, that, of course, as well as with most other things, curiosity is created in the process of exploring something - which throws up more questions, and more openings.
In this, blogging is very similar to actual painting/sketching. When I started drawing, I could not for the life of me find things to draw - as if the translation between what I would see everywhere around me to something I would try and put down on paper just didn't exist. With time, it was fascinating to see how suddenly everything around could turn into something to draw/paint - suddenly the overripe pear in the fruit bowl transformed itself into a fascinating still life and the grey low clouds starting showing off their yellow, blues and purples.

School days

I'm at my parents for my Mum's birthday. My Mum was telling stories of how apparently I've always enjoyed painting... according to her (and of course completely different to my memories) in kindergarten papers and pens were rationed when I was around as I would go through three paintings where others did one - 'easily bored' I think is what my Mum would call it.

Anyways, my memories of painting in school were rather uneventful... don't think that much of it seemed important and I was indeed easily bored. I discovered the folder of some of that school art, and with it probably one of the reasons for that lack of inspiration:
Sheet upon sheet filled with perspective drawings; two vanishing points, one vanishing point, interiors, exteriors, houses in suburban settings, in woodlands etc... all seemingly preparing one for a career in technical drawing.

Have a look for yourself:


Pencil on paper, 40x30 cm


More pencil on paper, 40x30cm

And hey ho, here's some cubist colour theory:


Poster paint on paper, 40x30cm