I don’t paint people much, which is strange as I find people fascinating. I don’t think I have any more planned exhibitions for 2024, so I could set myself a summer project. The few people I can pull out of the digital or even real-world portfolio are all thinking about something.
Maybe that is my thing, I hadn’t realised. Even a pair of dancers are not truly engaged with one another or the viewer. Lost in their individual worlds despite being physically dependent on one another.
Even my recent cold water swimmer is lost within the tiles of the shower.
The more I look the more pensive people I find. Storm Agnes, raging but full of thought.
There is even a portrait of me in our hallway , pondering.
Seems that pondering is a creative theme. I had no idea!
P s In the interests of research I went in search of a painting that has been stored here for many years.
My first portrait from my Foundation degree, hiding in lofts, attics and barns for 25 years or so.
In one of life’s uncanny twists, I discovered recently that my DNA is 10% Viking. But that is not particularly important to this ponder. I seem to have always liked people in my paintings to be deep in thought. A point worth pondering I think
You would think a day of painting, that I had planned and looked forward to, would be made even more possible by another day of disgusting weather.
But then the ‘ tasks’ seduced me, and before paint could be laid on paper I started a minor tidy up which led to a major tidy up of the art cupboard.
Which led to 2 hours of trying to coax a dead printer back to life. Unsuccessfully. Which led to me losing my phone , in the spice drawer of all places . Found after 2 hours of maniacal back tracking with false memories of when I last used it. Consequently not a drop of paint touched paper yesterday.
But on a positive, the black tulips look wonderful in the rain and the art cupboard is fabulous. The printer remains deceased.
Coincidentally I dressed today in homage to a black tulip. Art bag and DM’s feeling the tulip love.
Concatenation is a wonderful thing. Post proper job I have dabbled in admin and writing for Arts organisations and now in a strange twist of concatenation as a non-tennis player I do admin for a tennis club.
Not ‘just’ a tennis club but a coastal garden and Clubhouse that is available to host community events.
One such community is Rhizome Artists who meet once a week in the clubhouse. Rhizome are Exhibiting locally and the venue of the exhibition has a cafe that does great coffee and cake so a visit was the obvious thing to do.
So coffee, and cake but not concatenation were my anticipated outcomes of the visit.
Early on I met Tim who was taking some standard photographs of the whole exhibition. We had a small natter and he left. I enjoyed my coffee and cake and a lovely wide-ranging conversation with my gentleman companion. We then spent a lot of time enjoying the art, some of which is in the pictures below.
Kathleen arrives in these parts tomorrow. Only the second time since naming began that Britain has achieved a 16th-named storm. I only became fully engaged with storms when I took up regular sea swimming or ‘ bobbing’ as it is known in these parts. Living on a small peninsular has made me ‘tuned in’ to the weather in a way that I have never quite been before. I have recently, in the last couple of years taken to painting the sensation of the storm. This year I have been concentrating on printing so have missed out on all the storms since Agnes, in early October.
Storm Agnes- Private Collection
Until a storm arrives I never really know if it will take human form or be an abstract force.
But whichever sort of storm it is, my grubby ‘weather’ tin of colours is available.
Which brings me to today’s random question.
What job would you do for free?
Maybe I could be a storm P.R/ Artist. Give them some character before they arrive, elevate their good points and downplay their obnoxious behaviours. In fantasy land I could be flown to meet them when they first hit British land. Do a quick sketch in the way that notorious criminals are sketched in court*
Then rather than only being identified only by their trail of destruction, a storm could also present a more benign face to the world. People might be more motivated to forgive a storm that empties their dustbin in the street if the storm could be considered elegant or well-dressed. Quirky even.
* In British courts no photography is permitted. Special Court artists are employed by news agencies to depict the main characters in a trial for illustrating the events in court in print, television or digital media.There are four professional courtroom sketch artists in total: Priscilla Coleman, Siân Frances, Julia Quenzler and Elizabeth Cook. All four artists are self-taught.
A marvelous art blog exists called Making a Mark. Below is their article about Court Artists.
Isn’t it deliciously mad that such a career exists. Being a storm artist seems almost normal in comparison. But how long would I do it for free?
Maybe a nanosecond or forever, art is like that. There is nothing like the moment when somebody buys a piece or original art. In my head I flip and cartwheel like an Olympic gymnast. It is not the reason I create but goodness me it is a wonderful feeling when it happens.Storm artist, free until someone pays me!
I realise my * is in the wrong place, my blog my rules.
For anyone who loves great art writing, this Facebook page is the Make a Mark resource I discovered today.
Spring really is dragging its heels a bit. Sundays tease us with some sun but then the rain and the greige return. I am lucky that every day I get to visit an art exhibition first thing in the morning. I get to appreciate the dank beauty of a West Country winter by checking out Clare Rogers Dartmoor trees; whilst being grumpy about the misery of a dank spring.
I’ve even made casseroles and meat pies this week like a woman trying to perk up January.
There is a point to my wet weather moaning. I deliberately took a different route home yesterday to maximise walking in less exposed, weather whipped paths . I came to these building works boards and actually read the notice attatched.
Suddenly my grey old day was filled with Razzle Dazzle.
Dazzle paint was developed by the artist Norman Wilkinson and used on ships in the First and Second World Wars to confuse the eyes of the enemy.
Dazzle isn’t camouflage: it was realised very early on that it would be impossible to give a ship one paint scheme that would hide it in all the environments it would sail through. Instead, the geometric shapes made it difficult to visually assess the class, distance, position and movement of ships, thereby making it difficult to Thus the term “Dazzle” or “Razzle Dazzle” was used to target. describe the paint schemes. The marine artist Norman Wilkinson came up with the theory that the appearance of a ship could be altered by painting it in high contrast colours. Angular lines were used to make the work of a range finder difficult.
The dazzle schemes played with light and dark, the concept of countershading being used: parts of the ship that would naturally be shaded- under guns and overhangs – were painted bright white so as to hide the shape of the shadow. The same principle was used in reverse for parts that were usually cast in light. Tops of gun barrels would be painted in darker shades than the bottoms. White was usually used for masts because white would blend in with the sky in many situations. The decks of ships were also painted, to disguise it when the ship was listing heavily. All parts of ships tended to be painted, from funnels to guns to boats.
Dazzle-painted ships constituted the world’s largest public art and design display ever assembled. It’s legacy lives on and around the world Dazzle has been applied to buildings, cars, clothes and shoes, and continues to influence art, design and fashion. Investigations continue as to how Dazzle can be adapted for practical uses in non-military settings.
All fascinating stuff and thrillingly I get to use a new word in my next sentence. Thanks Google.
Norman Wilkinson with Dazzle in hand.
Norman Wilkinson was not just a camoufleur.
He also designed travel posters, which I love
All in all a rainy day with unexpected purpose.
Clare Rogers is exhibiting at Ocean Studios until and including Easter Sunday.
My procrastination took an interesting turn today. With a list of art admin to achieve I decided to start a painting entirely unconnected with the upcoming exhibition. Another riff on the theme of the contemporary green man.
This one has sunglasses instead of the traditional socketless eyes. His face is bathed with dappled sunlight as he emerges from his greenery. Which then had a good dose of bracken added.
Which will need to be greened down a bit tomorrow and his teeth painted in. Still avoiding the actual tasks of the day I gave him a digital tweak using a pop filter.
Thank goodness paint does need to dry! In those gaps I managed most of the jobs scheduled for today . For all those men who requested a bald representation of male fertility. Here he is.
This was a late commission for a retirement party. About 24 hours. I was also invited to the party so there was a personal scrubbing-up deadline to be met. The party was for a work colleague in a workplace that I had left a while ago. It was a fabulous lunchtime gathering of people that I had worked with in fairly intense situations, and it was such a pleasure to see them all again, because they were all people that I trusted when the going got tough. When we worked together, just seeing them pile in as a part of a small on-call team was a real pleasure because there were no egos in the room. Now before you all think. ‘ No workplace is that perfect’ I would agree wholeheartedly. But yesterday the people who make work life difficult were not at the table. And that was the point of the commission. The colleague who retired had a secret code at workplace social gatherings if she was bored or someone was being a twat. She would ask the colleague who commissioned the painting a seemingly random question. A sign that they should try to extricate themselves. Not exactly a ‘safe’ word but a sentence that could make or break an evening out. The sentence is hidden in the painting.
No-one mentioned canoes yesterday so that is a sign of a great gathering.
A ponder came from yesterday.
Wouldn’t work be fab if all the lovely people worked together and the twats just pissed each other off.
Now I am a team of one how do I know I am ‘team lovely` I could be ‘team twat’
P.s I am not used to delivering paintings when the paint is still wet. Normally I get the chance to tweak. I see some tweaks but cant nip into the studio. A very odd feeling.
Yesterday bought me face to face with a very old ponder. When I was 16, in rural Essex, I discovered the joy of gathering in a pub on a Friday night with my friends. For a natter and a catch-up, before we headed off to the giddy excitement of rural or semi-rural nightclubs or live music events at the local college. Alcohol was not involved because public transport didn’t exist much beyond 8pm. We gathered at a pub called the Green Man. Sometimes we discussed men,mostly the real-world sort but occasionally and without Google or a vast library of reference books we pondered where all the Green Women were.
Yesterday I started singing, with a community choir, a contemporary collection of songs called The Green Man. Composed not five minutes from my current home and inspired by the same landscape that inspired my Green Androdgyny
I have spent an extremely small percentage of my life pondering the folklore of the Green Man. Puzzled that the human face of the arrival of spring is male. Last year I created an androdgynous Green person for a Spring exhibition. I have been down a green- man -google- rabbit- hole researching the whole Green Man tradition and am both older and wiser and yet not wiser. If there is a female version of the green man she is less well known, has a more awkward name and not surprisingly has a more active role in creating Spring. Sheela Na Gig is represented as a woman with disproportionately large genitals. Almost essential given that in other portrayals she is actually giving birth to trees and bushes that already have a full compliment of leaves and fruit. Splayed branches out first. Deeply uncomfortable with a high risk of tears, either meaning of the words and probably both at the same time.
March is here. My fate or destiny for the day is set. The first sea swim of the new month awaits. I have spent the week mistressing* a new printing technique. Gelli printing. My shoulders are tight from concentration and need the morning swim. I wouldn’t be in this tight time constraint with tight shoulders if I had used the last 18 months wisely. I hadn’t printed since Art School when I planned and curated a print exhibition in a local gallery. In the summer of 2022. The printers I worked with were inspirational and I vowed to take up printing, to be well prepared when the next exhibition happened. I am rubbish at long deadlines. A sensible woman would have done printing courses. Not me! I did a watercolour course and fell back in love with the serendipity and subtlety of pigment in water. I do have a print course booked in two weeks, exactly one week before the exhibition. Meanwhile I am trying to invent a method that involves printing and watercolour. Madness.
This morning a swimming friend sent me the video at the end of the blog. Oh dear!!! My tight shoulders got an early work out as I chuckled and was appalled. I have used those smug phrases.
” I swim all year actually “
Even worse for me, in a distant life I moved from London to Brighton
” Well, Hove, actually” **
In other printing news, next year’s Christmas cards are with the printers. Last use of the C word until the other side of Autumn.
Happy St Davids Day, enjoy the vid.
* I like to rehabilitate the word ‘Mistress’ from its philandering connotations. I don’t need to master anything I am a woman trying to create a mistresspiece.
** ‘Hove actually’ is another, possibly smug, statement known to all who live or have lived on the South Coast.
This morning I had to hunt for an old sketch to send to a friend. The easy solution was to look in my Paintings/Art file of digital images.
This file is 10 years old in 2024, I am hopeless at keeping this archive up to date. This morning I put the two most recent paintings into the file. I also had a little scroll through an imperfect record of my creative output of the last ten years.
Once again I have mentally promised myself to be more diligent with my archiving over the next 10 years.And for now I must be more diligent in actually producing some actual art. Less pondering, more art .
theoldmortuary.design 