December (2021) selfies & goodbye studio!

 It seems so long ago now, but it was just last month that I finished my studio residency at Signal Arts Centre. (Do a search on this blog for other work done, both this year and previous years, during this residency.) As was my daily practice while at Signal, I did self-portrait sketches as a warm-up exercise. Though by the beginning of December I had already brought most supplies home, I made sure to keep my cookie tin of materials for the selfie sketches. For this one I used a soft charcoal pencil.

When working with watercolour for selfie sketches, I like to limit myself to three colours, blocking in the colour first and then using a watercolour pencil to define a few lines.

After drawing in the basics of my face with watercolour pencil for this sketch, I decided to highlight my festive earrings. I have different daily festive earrings to wear in the month of December!

I got into the habit of doing a blind contour drawing every Friday while in the Signal studio, so this was my very last selfie sketch of 2021.

After packing the last few things to bring home and a quick tidy up, I turned to the studio for one last look before closing and locking the door. I left the table coverings for the next resident.

November selfies (2021)

Happy New Year! Before I start with this year, however, I have to catch up on the last couple of months of 2021! As per the past few years, I had a studio residency at Signal Arts Centre for 10 weeks, in Oct, Nov and Dec. One of my self-appointed daily tasks was to do a warm-up self-portrait sketch everyday that I was in the studio. I blogged about the October selfies here. For other information on the residencies for the past few years, a search on this blog for Signal Arts Centre should turn up loads of information and pictures.

This is a soft pencil sketch.

Limiting myself to a few watercolours and one brush, I can work very quickly blocking in an image. I like to put in some drawing over the watercolour to add some definition. In this sketch I used a watercolour pencil for the line work.

I got into the habit of doing a blind contour drawing on Fridays. For this sketch I used a brown felt tip marker. When else will I ever use BROWN!?

I had my folder full of different paper scraps at the studio and some glue, so I decided one day to do a selfie collage.

Back to a limited water colour use but this time using a fine tip black marker pen to do some line work.

Lots to choose from in my cookie tin of materials, so this day I decided on a soft charcoal pencil.

This entire sketch is drawn with watercolour pencils but mostly I used them as dry colouring pencils. I wetted the tip of a purple one to draw in a few defining lines.

Signal Arts Centre - October selfies!

Each morning at Signal studio, I start the day with a self-portrait in a dedicated sketchbook. The medium that I decide to use in my sketch entirely depends on my mood that particular day. I enjoy doing this daily exercise as a warm-up and have a variety of media from which to choose. I am surprised that I didn't blog more about my daily self-portraits while at Signal studio in previous years, but I dedicated a post to them in 2017 and two posts in 2020 (here & here). Last week I included a selfie in my post about starting this year's residency, here. For posts about this residency in previous years (since 2017) just do a search for Signal Arts Centre within this blog.

Generally I do a fairly straightforward selfie, but this day I must have felt like the hand was a "sigh" gesture and included it! I think the sketch was done with a 6B pencil.

On this day, I limited myself to three colours from the cake watercolour tray and used a fine black pen for the drawing.

When I do a selfie exercise, I tend not to correct mistakes or labour over the drawing, so what happens happens. In this one, drawn with a soft charcoal pencil, I did not observe the correct distance from my bottom lip and ended up showing myself as having a weaker chin than I do. But really it is a little disconcerting that my staring eyes give me the grim look of Myra Hindley...

I enjoy using watercolour pencils for a sketch, dipping the pencil directly into water, leaving it dry or using a wet brush to spread the colour a bit. 

By limiting my watercolour palette I can block in an image quickly and then define it afterwards with a fine pen.

A soft pencil is always nice to sketch with.

And sometimes using a soft pencil compels me to work a little longer on the sketch. I remember that day I was wearing my NASA t-shirt, so that the end result of me feeling like a crew member of the Enterprise was no suprise. Could I be Captain?

Aos Dara/Umha Aois Symposium 2020 Part I

I wrote about having my proposal accepted for this year's Aos Dara/Umha Aos combined symposium here and included some of my preparations. I saw last year's work, which I blogged about here reviewed for CIRCA Magazine here. Tomnafinnoge Wood is really beautiful! It is an old oak forest with two rivers and several paths from which to explore it.

My intention was to explore different media and while I had prepared graphite and acrylic pages in advance to work on, while I was at Tomnafinnoge Wood, I did some bark rubbings.

 I thought I might use them in planned collages, and though I didn't, they got me into the mood!

I also collected some oak leaves while I was at the forest and printed from them directly when I got home.

Using my watercolour pencils, I did some sketches from the numerous research photos I had taken during my day in the woods. There were some very strange looking mushrooms growing on trees!

There were lots of smaller mushrooms at ground level too, on fallen, mossy tree limbs, and I even found a quite large Faerie Ring, which neither me or my companions dared to trespass in! I did especially like these mycelial networks and wanted to work more with the image. I'll report more on this in next week's blog.

Liminal

A few months ago I responded to an "open call" opportunity that was listed in Curator Space, a newsletter that provides information and opportunities for artists. Although most of these opportunities are more relevant to UK artists, some are international, and others (like this one) was online so anyone could apply. The open call was specific: artists must have a sense of humour, an interest in playing with scale, and their work must fit through the curator's letterbox. The curator of Tiny Cat Gallery is designer/artist Lisa Cole and the gallery is a cardboard box organised, invigilated and frequented by tiny plastic cats. Cole was responsible for all onsite photography and Instagram posting. She can be followed (as herself) on instagram @lisa_cole_designer and (as gallery curator) @tiny.cat.gallery.

I often make miniature work when coming up with new ideas - sketches, paintings, collages - so I looked through my own recent oeuvre to come up with a theme and suitable small work that would appear huge in the gallery. I applied for an exhibition and was accepted. My teen, who is obsessed with cats despite allergies, has a number of tiny plastic cats, so we chose one to send as an ambassador along with the work.

I sent enough work to fit on the box/gallery walls, but I forgot to take into account that one wall would not be used as a space since it was necessary for Ms Cole to access the gallery in order to take photographs for instagram posts. So Shore I and

Shore II were not actually included in the exhibition. All works, however feature on Lisa Cole's website, here.

Before I posted my package to Bristol (where the physical gallery is) I photographed the work and Ms Cole produced an invitation for the online exhibition.

The exhibition was for one week and the launch party on the Sunday afternoon was an indication of the fun that would be had with the work and the cats all week. Narratives accompanied each instagram post (at least four daily). In this one the cats are discussing the nature of "liminality" as a follow-up to their earlier dream discussion...

As my see-through cat ambassador embodied liminality, it put on a performance channelling Tilda Swinton's "The Maybe". For more information about Swinton's performance, have a peek here and here. My ambassador, Lucky, chose to perform between my two silk fibre pieces, Star Cloud and Narcissus. For more information on how I made these pieces during a Zoom papermaking workshop, have a look here.

 One of Monday's instagram posts featured Shore III and Shore IV, working well as a diptych, as well as Star Cloud and Narcissus.

Several artists from previous exhibitions at Tiny Cat Gallery had devised workshops related to their work, and I was no exception. The point of my workshop was to explore colour, shape and luminosity. I took a photo of the items needed for the workshop and posted "how-to" details on Thursday morning. Tiny Cat Gallery made a poster advert for the workshop and re-posted details for both the tiny cat visitors and for anyone following along on Instagram.

The tiny cats had some playful pre-workshop moments...

 and created their own "liminal" painting.

On the Friday, one of the posts featured Branches II & III as a diptych taking up an entire wall of the gallery. I have had both solo and group exhibitions in various countries over the past 35 years, but I can easily say this was the most fun and most engaging exhibition of my career!

Signal Studio - winding down

At the end of the seventh week in the studio, I finally finished my paintings. I was able to sign the larger one below a bit of scrim on the front, but for the smaller paintings I just signed the back as it would be impossible to paint my signature on the heavy texture which covered the canvas.

On the Monday of week 8, I used the last piece of grey paper on which I had been doing pastel drawings. Though I could have brought more of that paper in, I decided that it was a good time for me to refocus. Besides, all the pastels needed a spray of fixative - so I did this at the end of each day before I left.

I took down all my reference photos and pastel drawings and hung up the finished paintings (and the canvas on the right, which had not been painted!).

During the final three weeks I decided to stick to my routine of at least having three things that I would focus on daily. I continued doing a self-portrait in the morning and started a series of tiny watercolour pencil drawings. I had a small pad of Strathmore watercolour paper postcards.

I was thinking of doing a series of drawings where I would use an eraser to draw on a ground of graphite. However, the toothy Fabriano paper I was using did not allow for a solidly dark ground and made it impossible to erase back to white. Though I was happy with the final drawing of persimmons, I decided not to continue with a series at this time.

Instead, I decided my time would be better served by doing sketches for possible lino block prints -- a projected series for 2019. In order to get started, I taped several sheets of paper to each drawing board.

For the most part, I fitted two to-size drawings on each page. I realise that the more detail that is in the initial drawing, the more successful will be the final print. I am looking forward to continuing this work in the coming year.

Signal studio - works in progress

I set up a mirror in the studio, so one of the first things I did every morning was sketch a self-portrait while drinking a cup of ginger tea. I took this picture recently, so a full studio is behind me. As well as a selfie, for the first seven weeks of the residency I did a pastel drawing and worked on my "Antibes Paintings" daily.

This is a November self-portrait in watercolour pencil. I have a tendency to squint when I attempt a smile at myself.

Before starting the residency at Signal Art Centre, I had prepared a number of canvases in advance with a heavy scrim texture and applied an undercoat of quinacridone violet. So I wasted no time in blocking my canvases once ensconced in the studio!

My paintings are always a slow build up of colour.

The largest canvas has its place on the large easel in the studio, but the small canvases would be on the adjacent table or hand held when I was working on them.

The Key

I have been attending a ceramics workshop at Signal Arts Centre on Thursday afternoons for a few months now. Prior to this, I had not worked in clay for nearly 30 years! How did it get away from me? I love working with clay and find it incredibly therapeutic. I wanted to test the possibility of making ceramic book covers for some of my handmade books. I thought of a simple "stick" book, and realised since the front cover could not bend, I would have to make a front half cover for the book binding. The back cover is about 9 cm square - it was only slightly larger before firing. I used a rubber stamp to add my name to the back cover after I rolled out a bit of lace to put texture on the book covers.

I had the idea for a book of images of a key and prepared pages from handmade Khadi paper, an Indian 100% cotton rag paper.

I did some test rubbings of two different house keys and preferred the one from my childhood home in Toronto.

Page one is a rubbing using black wax.

Page two was made using a Chinese ink wash and a Stabilo superfine pen.

 Page three was created by making a rubbing with graphite and erasing areas with a kneadable eraser.

 Page four is a watercolour pencil drawing.

Page five is a copper wax rubbing.

 Page six is a 3B pencil drawing.

Page seven is a watercolour pencil drawing of the negative space around the key.

Page eight, the final page, is an embossing of the key.

I will detail the final book in the next post.