delimiter

light and shade. round 2

leads to this. in unspecified dimensions.

stuffed

"Are you not pleased you stuck with it?"
The three-year old isn't quite sure though. Now she has looked closely at the colour of the stuffed cheetah. She has also continued - three times over - with its spots. All on her mother's encouragement.
Spot and spot again. The educational advice.


All the while gulls are circling above our heads on wire.

chickens don't just scratch

now with improved animation and sound that isn't straight out of the recorder (or indeed a location).
there is hope yet for a boiling mud pot remix.
happy oyster catching!

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.

The bull's hollow in live

Water reflections #1
Soft pastel on board, 35x25cm

On the first morning at my parents' at breakfast,

I to my brother: 'Torben, do you want to come to the bull's hollow with me?'
My mum [alarmed]: 'Oh dear, what do you want to do there?'
Torben: 'Paint it... because it's so spooky' [makes funny noise].

And he guessed without reading my earlier post.

We didn't make it that day.

Morning 2 when I get downstairs for breakfast:
My mum: 'Karsten [my dad] already wanted to go with you to the bull's hollow so that you can paint, but you've slept too long.'

So, that afternoon, all four of us go. My mum rather keen to avoid the hollow [because it's so spooky (makes funny noise)], but in the end, they leave me there and go for a walk and I for a paint.

Here's some prep sketches and one of pastels of the lochan at the bottom of the hollow. It was so still that you couldn't tell what was the reflection and what the birch trees.

Bullenkuhle, study 1
pen, ink and neo ii in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Bullenkuhle, study 3
graphite in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Hm... I hadn't used the water soluble graphite for some time, but I do like it a lot;
and: these are trees I do like, too
(well, at least the birch, the junipers are a bit rough and ready, I admit)
... much more than symbolic ones.

There's a twin post with another pastel across at Watermarks on this... here

Rising moon

A summer night, in the middle of SO36 and a rising moon.
A bit of automated drawing in darkness.
A nocturne, unknowingly, unwittingly.
Three lights sources across four pages.

Goerlitzer Park at Night
Ink in Moleskine, 52x21cm

Rising moon

Light my face
let me shine
like you do
in light
that is not mine
nor yours

But shine we do

And as you may guess... I am gone.
As the posts earlier this week,
I leave my blog on autopilot for a few days.

Travelog

Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
36x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii

The most recent moley I had from the exchange had gone travelling with me to London, Berlin and back to Glasgow. I like the idea of figuring out what to do next in each moley a lot: it's storytelling as process, and it's interesting to see how different each of us deals with the storytelling.

So: mine was action drawing... hahaha... on 9x14cm with a pen... no paint dribbles in sight.

Have a look - out of the window on the 9:39 am Glasgow - London Euston for 20 mins or so; a tube ride from Mile End to Victoria, until someone sat next to me and obscured the view; after breakfast in my friends' living room in Berlin when they had gone for work; and yet another airport queue in Schoenefeldt while the passport control was slow as usual. I coloured in when back home.

Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii


Lindsay's Maps and Destination Moley
9x14cm, Pen, ink and neo ii

Where on earth does this one vanish to?

A month ago, when I went to the seaside one afternoon, the very first thing I did was getting to the seashore - the tide was far out, I was crossing some streams and puddles, but then I was there: a fairly calm and friendly waterline, small waves rolling frequently, the sun was shining ocassionally, and after watching all of this for a wee while I begun to sketch. I had just taken an A4 sketchbook and an ink pen with me.

Troon shoreline,
Pen and ink, 21x29cm



Troon shoreline,
Pen and ink, 29x21cm

Troon shoreline,
Pen and ink, 21x29cm

I ended up with a series of a dozen or so quick sketches: trying to capture the rhythms of the water as the tide was advancing, observing puddles to fill up quickly, shorelines to alter within a couple of minutes and all the time trying to figure it all out: the coming and going of the waves, when would break, intermingle, flow back, be quiet - I'm sure there's lots of words for all this... but here's some of those sketches.


They don't make much sense, do they?! They don't have to, though. It's about marks, little reminders of patterns, the moving shoreline. And funnily enough, looking at them, they give me plenty of those reminders, in particular about the shoreline itself where water meets sand but also about the patternings of the advancing tide.

The one I have been circling around [as in this misshapen oil sketch here] is a view right along the waterline, sand on left, water on right and a bit of horizon line. If I go through my photo folders, I will find dozens of these photos, they frequently make it onto the background of my computer. The line where it all happens.

Depending on where I stand, it can have a low or a high view point, no horizon lines, but in any case there is usually plenty of skewing of the viewing plane the lower my view point is. And this is what I was struggling with in the previous sketches (in ink, oil pastels, oil) with this view.

So, I've been doing some more sketches, altering the view point, reading up on vanishing points (one, two or three), digging around various books on drawing (again, Bert Dodson's Keys to Drawing is coming out tops for this [see Katherine Tyrrell's review on the book here]), only to discover two things:

1. no, my problem has nothing to do with a three point perspective and various vanishing points: it's a flat plain I'm trying to depict, and it is about distortions on the shoreline, not about vanishing points... duhuh... sometimes it's not the answer that is wrong but the question ;)

Waterline, Troon beach,
Pencil in Moleskine, 24x21cm

Waterline, Troon beach,
Pencil in Moleskine, 24x21cm

2. I could spend endless time with yet more sketches; treating it as a geometrical probem (and feel like I was back in secondary school with some architectural drawings to do, see here). I don't think that that's time well spent. This is primarily an EMPIRICAL problem: I need to go to the beach again and watch, observe: what does the shoreline look like. I'm sure that will sort it.
So, while I have plenty of good sketches on wave patterns, my sketches miss the detail of different view points, distortions resulting from that, and possibly much more.

To the beach, then...

The virgin, the beautiful, and bright today

... so goes the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé's The Swan.

I stumbled across it in some of the notes on Cy Twombly's earlier works in the Cycles and Season's exhibition at the Tate Modern. Stumbled across a whole series of white square drawings in pencil with splatters, splashes and markings of white oil paint. Each of them has a horizon line, drawn with a ruler, just a couple of inches below the top.

Cy Twombly Poems to the Sea i-vi (1959)
oil, graphite, wax crayon on paper
approx. 33x31cm
Dia Art Foundation

The series is entitled Poems to the Sea. I thought of Joan Eardley and of Edwin Morgan's poem to Eardley and Floodtide (see post here).

On the surface Twombly's drawings and Eardley's seascapes don't seem to have all that much in common. One is white - classically white - sparse, restrained with some pencil marks and the faintest hint of colour. Well, for the other one - as Morgan says

All becomes art, and as if it was incensed
By the painter’s brush the sea growls up
In a white flood.
The artist’s cup
Is overflowing with what she dares
To think is joy, caught unawares

[Sorry, but you need to get the link to Morgan reading the poem again, too: here]

So, a whole wall full of these poems to the sea. The commentary remarks the influence of Mallarmé's poetry on these drawings. Notably: a play with words, connotations and sounds.

And it poses the question that if meaning is created by the relationship between words and sounds then surely the blank page on which these sit must be part of that relationality also. So, here the white, blank page for Mallarmé and Twombly.

I went hunting for the poem. Found it in French alongside some discussions on the difficulty of translation.

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujoud'hui
Stéphane Mallarmé

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujoud'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la region ou vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée a l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

And then there's the playfulness of so many translations and renderings, to keep the symbolism, to keep the obscurity, the creation of meaning and sounds and rhyme? John Holcombe's review of existing translations into English (see his site here), and various further attempts are intriguing: it is the play with words, meanings and translations which is fascinating in everyday use alone, but just leaves me speechless when it comes to poetry.

The virgin, the beautiful and bright today.
For us can the rapture of a wing-blow break
Beneath this frosted and forgotten lake
Snowy cascades of flights not fled away?

In past magnificence of another day
The swan remembers its freedom, but cannot make
A song from surroundings but only take
On the sterile dull glint of the winter's stay.

Out of white agony the whole neck lies
In a space inflicted that the bird denies.

Cold and immobile in its feathered being
Not in horror of earth but to brightness gone:
A dream wrapped in scorn, and a phantom, seeing
How futile is exile for the Swan.

(Translation John Holcombe
http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-mallarme-1.html)

Cy Twombly Poems to the Sea xix-xxiv (1959)
oil, graphite, wax crayon on paper
approx. 33x31cm
Dia Art Foundation

So. The first post on Twombly is on whiteness, relationality and poetry.

It's the use of words, meanings - almost graffiti-like - that intrigued me in the exhibition. There'll be more on that. There's also some ideas on the playfulness of words and meanings in different languages - how it cannot be translated and the fact that purity of one language is just restrictive.

And having been in Germany for six weeks brought back some of those wonderfully idiosyncratic German words that I had already forgotten about. Like pingelig, Ausgleichssport, Dienstliches, sich so schoen vorfreuen, and many more... funny, can't think of them anymore already...

So many discussions I had on this over the past few months, quite a bit of writing done too. And Twombly's work picks up on that. I think there's something to be done around this. Let me think and write - and possibly eventually paint - on this a little bit more. Soon...

But there were more things in the exhibition. In fact, there were so many things that I did buy the catalogue. Only to add five more kilos to my other 25kgs of luggage to take with me on the final leg back to Glasgow. But that's been well worth it. Let me show you. Soon...

They wrestle with snakes

... not ordinary snakes, no: pythons. I saw them. Not all of them do, but some. I am sure of that.

The certainty came to me on a lunch break last week in London's West End. Lunch at the Victoria & Albert Museum opened my eyes. To Frederic Lord Leighton's Athlete Struggling with a Python.

Sketches of Leighton's 'Athlete struggling with Python'
Bronze, 1877, V&A

So manly, so strong, so determined. Do you see his stare, the muscles on his arms, the strong legs? All enframed by the glittering body of the snake, so smooth, so strong. And still: held at arm's length, they struggle, they stare. Who wins? Because a victory it has to be! The athlete, the snake?

Studies in pencil

So, I went back with the sketchbook, after having watched more wrestling with snakes over the ensuing days. I sketched and giggled. Pictured those academics as snake wrestlers. And giggled some more.

But they do. They wrestle with snakes. At least some of them do.

Conferences, hey.... festivals, road crashes, snake fights... can't help but watch, or participate even? Now, how did it happen that it suddenly looks as if I may be going to Las Vegas next spring after all? I knew there was a problem with watching too closely...

I've been saving this one....

... didn't know why. But I suppose it was for today:


In a recorded interview with Joan Eardley from the early 1960s she speaks of her love for the back streets of Glasgow and the children playing in the closes:

" I have been painting them for seven years...they don't pose - they come up and say 'will you paint me?'... I watch them moving about and do the best I can...the Samson's - they amuse me - they are full of what's gone on today - whose broken into what shop and whose flung a pie in whose face - it goes on and on. They just let out all their life and energy... and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms...all the bits of red and bits of colour and they wear each other's clothes - never the same thing twice running...even that doesn't matter... they are Glasgow - the richness Glasgow has - I hope it will always have - a living thing, intense quality - you can't ever know what you are going to do but as long as Glasgow has this I'll always want to paint." (Joan Eardley, Exhibition Catalogue 2007, p. 31f)

In the close
Mixed media collage in Moleskine
13x36cm
[Lorraine's Moley]

So, I'm back...

Some music to go alongside the bit of Eardley?

Try these... they worked well yesterday to drown out the noise of the Motherwell supporters who got on the train in Edinburgh:







OMG... so many to choose from...

The Lock

A lock, somewhere on Berlin's Landwehrkanal

The Lock, Pencil and neo ii in Moleskine, 13x21cm

Rise rise
Gushing water
Whirls. Gurgles. Gurns
We float
Upwards
Breathing in
Deeply
The Lock

Moley #5

... or #6? With being away, I haven't kept track of the consecutive numbering. In any case. The Eigg/Berlin travelog is pretty full. A few pages remain unused but it doesn't feel right to fill them now with having already left again. So, here's to a new one. Ordered it on Saturday, it arrived on Tuesday and now it's in full swing already.

It's just a year ago that I took up the sketchbook for everyday habit. And filling one within the space of two weeks is a new record for me. When I decided to use a sketchbook frequently I felt at loss at what to put in it - it's an important one, that one, don't you think so? It's similar to starting drawing/painting in general: where to find stuff to paint, draw, sketch in a world so full of stuff? It was similar with the sketchbook. And it's such a nice thing once everthing dull thing in this world seems worth a quick sketch.

I was keen on doing some abstract things, but sketchbooks just seemed for pretty illustration, and thus not for me. To counter that, I had planned to do some themed sketchbooks: one for a thorough investigation into different colours - or really: pigments; one to learn more about textures and mark-makings and one for travel. Somehow, only the latter got filled beyond the initial first pages; then I filled the textures one with everything, and now the one titled 'Colours' on its spine is really Eigg/Berlin July 2008.

Lesson no 1 to self: Have one sketchbook to take whereever and to do in it whatever. The media I've used expanded: from pencil/graphite/neo iis, they now also feature pastels, acrylics, oils and increasingly pen and ink; there's also plenty of notes on exhibitions, quick copy sketches of paintings/sculptures I like; a bit of general chit chat and my little attempts at word plays for seabirds, clouds etc.

Pencil and neo ii sketch in Moleskine, 13x21cm of
Great Kalao Bird, Wooden Sculpture
Museum Berggruen, Berlin

As a way of inspiring my sketchbook use I pre-treated plenty pages: with watercolour washes, and more often acrylics. Hm. That was such a bad decision. It really annoyed me throughout this last book: what on earth do I do with waves of raw umber when I want to sketch a Berlin skyline. Sorry. That was such a bad move. There were one or two lucky ones: e.g. lemon yellow underpaintings usually work with plenty of stuff. But grass green, and certainly a dark umber are completely different and most often did not work.

Lesson no 2 to self: don't do waves, splashes or anything in earth colours and green in any future sketchbook. EVER! A bit of lemon yellow is ok, maybe a pale grey/blue wash too. And if it doesn't fit, don't pretend it's not there, skip that page and go back to it. It does not look good, Gesa, seriously!

Just have a look here: yellow ochre's the culprit

Clouds over Rum, ink and neo ii in Moleskine, 26x21cm

"The drawing that is fast,...

... direct and right at first time with an economy of effort or line, is either beginner's luck (and no less a blessing) or, more likely, achieved as a result of the accumulated legwork that has already been put in over the years. Rather than a sudden flash of inspiration, it is a release of controlled energy that crackles with its own spontaneous life.
The knowledge of drawing packed solidly behind it, so a line conveys simultaneously form, weight and authority.

Another morning coffee, pen and ink in Moleskine, 13x21cm

The speedy slick line is only that: all shallow effect, no form, no substance - a fast lick of Brylcreem on a very thin thatch.
Drawing is unquestionably difficult, clumsy at times, sometimes longwinded and slow. It will show every thought, every change of mind, every unsure probe and rethink."
(Pamela Kay, A personal view: Gouache, p. 47)

Ohne M, pen and ink in Moleskine, 13x21cm

I had taken Pamela Kay's fantastic book about gouache with me to Eigg - along with the gouaches themselves, which I ended up not using at all. But I managed to read quite a bit in her book. In particular her chapter on drawing was fascinating, and the above quote stuck.
Part of my previous hesitation about using ink was that I felt it to be too solid, too definite. The searching for lines, patterns and marks seemed so restricted. On the other hand are the minimal lessenings I've been doing for a while: short, sparse, definite hints at something, with the something usually being landscapes.
Her quote is, I feel, about both these issues. And about much more. Towards the end of the week on the island I had firmly gotten to like the ink pen: its strong marks which would still remain searching and open.
So my sketches in metropolitan and summery Berlin continue along the same lines (sorry!), and yet are so different from only a week ago. Places and people, I suppose.

Island time

Across the pier, Ink and neo ii in Moleskine, 26x21cm

Island time
It embraces you
Engulfs you like the tide
It's ferry time
Neep and spring
Circular not linear
You sink into it

Island time
All around you
It warms your body. Your heart. Your soul
It's all there is

And off into the horizon again

... not westwards as this view towards Barra but to the East today.

Trawler and Barra, Ink and neo ii in Moleskine (21x13cm)

I'll leave you to my blog's autopilot for a wee while. I'm curious how that will work. I am very much a 'write post and post it now' person. While I had initially prepared many draft posts, I found I never really went back to most of them - despite having promised tutorials on clouds gazing etc. So, when Blogger introduced the auto-post for future dates function I pretty much ignored it. Somehow I do like the idea of writing something to store for future publication. But my liking of that is pretty much abstract and remained abstract rather than practical. So, I'm curiously watching from afar as Blogger will be spouting out a few prepared post. And don't get cross if I don't reply to the posted comments immediately - but I'm never too quick with that one anyway.

See you soon.

A look out of the window last week

... while making tea was like this: every morning, afternoon and evening. The distance depending on the cloud base, rain and general fog.

Amazing what you can find in this, if you stretch your eyes, mind and general outlook.

So, here's the teaser for the recent entry in our Moleskine project. It's posted off today to Vivien, so I may show the rest in a short while. This one's been good fun.

Well... realising that among the two hundred photos I took, there is not a single one from the view I painted most over the past week, here's a sketch... a sunny one:

The most magnificient drama, Ink and neo ii in Moleskine (26x13cm)

And another one in pastel, sunny again. Same spot, different drama in the skies:

While making Tea, Pastel in Moleskine (21x13cm)

Seabirds...

Seabirds swim
Ink and Neo ii in Moleskine (26x21 cm)

They swim. They fly
On the waves
When they break
All turquoise and white
They flap their wings
A few seconds long
Then they swim
Again
Floating
Towards
The shoreline.

And another box...

... this time, my old and battered drawing box.

In fact, I had already made a new, larger one several months back as this was becoming severely undone. Yesterday, it occurred to me that I could use my collage skills to save this one. It's old, a cardboard box made when I was 17 or so, it has for the recent years enjoyed a lot of traveling as my drawing tool collection. So, on went some collage.

Also, I decided that my watersoluble Neocolour sticks are unnecessarily large. If I broke them into half, I figured, I could have two for one. The way I use them is really as replacement for watercolour - a light smudge of them, then some water and that's all the colour reference I need. I updated my collection to include some hansa yellow and red earth. I found they actually mix pretty well, so the 10 or so sticks I have get me pretty much wherever my colour eyes take me.

Now, with only half the stick length there is even some space left, so I'll make sure I get another watersoluble graphite stick (slightly harder than the 6B I already have) and I put some of the ink pens

Ink is something I tend to avoid when drawing: too definite and solid. But I think that's plenty of reason to take them along for the fun. I also figured I will only need a putty rubber rather than another standard one. Into the box too go alongside a couple standard pencils (HB, 2B and 4B), a waterbrush (to work with the graphite and the neo ii), a small blade and a sharpener.

Great... next come the oils, but with them I already now what to take. Paper, paper, board remains...