Lino prints

I started cutting a lino block way back in the Summer, when my courgette plants were young, and the first fruits were forming on them. But I didn't get round to printing from the block until recently (the start of some damp Autumn weather). I'm doing this in stages - I think it's called reductive printing. Here are some of the prints. After an initial yellow/orange print, I cut out some more and printed in leaf green:

For the third print down I dabbed a bit of red ink straight onto the lino before printing. I like the result, but don't want to ruin it by printing over it, so it may stay as it is...

I want to make a virtue out of the fact that I can't get perfect prints without a press, but you get more texture in the areas where the inks are thinner. I'm hoping that after several more overprints the layers of ink will still be visible beneath the final one.

Now the third stage of cutting and overprinting.  I also wanted to try printing on tissue paper. The finer the paper, the easier to get a print. At first I thought I'd go for dark blue/green:

This print was directly onto yellow tissue. I hope that there's enough detail there not to miss the earlier under-printing.

Then something told me to try a lighter, more turquoise ink:

 

 

I'm pleased with these. Just one more layer of colour to go...which I think might be a rich purple, but then again I might change my mind....

Pastel Peppers

Here is a drawing I made in my sketchbook. The peppers had been lurking in the fridge for a while. They needed eating, but I wanted to record their concertina wrinkles before we chopped them up.

There's something very rewarding about drawing a still life of fruit in soft pastels. There's some affinity I find between the rich colours of both, and their textures.

A cot blanket for Albane

Some more baby knitting:

Audrey had started knitting a baby blanket, but didn't have time to finish, so I quickly and happily volunteered to help out....

She'd made a section of garter stitch, which needed to be valued, but I couldn't continue that for the rest of the length, so I added some rows with holes, then I thought of making patterns with holes, hence the date of birth and name, finishing it off with another row of holes and a pink ribbon.

Not the kind of thing I usually do, but appropriate for the task and hopefully will keep her warm as the nights draw in....

September painting week

It's taken me ages to get round to blogging, but better late than never....

I went up to Ray's for a week of painting in early September, and here are the results:

My first painting was of the sweetcorn flowers against the frame for the vine behind. We'd been talking about how to depict space and depth..not my forte!...but I was pleased with the forms of the drooping leaves and the composition of the crossing stems.

Here's a photo of the painting as I worked on it, in Ray's beautiful veggie garden:

And this one is unfinished. I was looking at some of David Hockney's landscapes and decided to try and work in heightened hues of flat colours, and I was pleased with the way this was coming along, but ran out of time...now I just need to finish it! (Same old story!)

Something for a little baby

A friend has just had a baby, a few weeks early, so she's very small, but healthy and happy. I wanted to give her something..and this is what I knitted for her:

It's only about 10cms long, but looks huge next to its new owner!

Inspired by my veggie patch ....

... I thought I'd sketch some of the forms and sights that fascinate me. So here goes:

First off is the courgette plant. Giant leaves with a mosaic of green and white, bright yellow trumpets of flowers, which so quickly twist up on themselves, holding on to the fruit itself, which can grow almost while you're watching it.

Working from sketches, I'm planning to make a lino print. Here's a rough drawing to work out the colour layers for the print:

Here's the lino, first cut:

Northern Spain

Here are the three 'sketches' I made on my iPod from our trip to Northern Spain. The more I use it, the happier I am about the lack of accuracy of the lines. I think it adds life to the image. The first is a much over-rated, tourist infested village of Santillana, full of honey coloured stone buildings.This was the view from our bedroom window.

Santillana del Mar

The nearby caves at Altamira are famous for the paintings on the roof of the cave, but the visitors were damaging the atmosphere, and therefore the paintings, so the Spanish have built a full-size, faithful recreation of the caves which you can walk through and see how the paintings appeared. There is a whole 'ceiling' of paintings, all jostling for position.  



Cave paintings at Altamira



Along the roadside there was masses and masses of broom in full flower - so here are those accents of yellow colouring a lakeside view.

Our journey took us along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Every day we passed pilgirms with backpacks and walking poles plodding along, sometimes on paths parallel to the road, sometimes just beside the road. It's 800kms from the French border, which is weeks of walking. As we continued towards Santiago my admiration grew for all those people who had the determination to press on, day in, day out making dogged progress under the hot sun, or in the rain. Here's a Santiago cake we bought in town - I loved the decoration; made with a stencil, I assume.



Santiago cake


As we were turning back North to cross the Pyrenees we saw clouds rolling over the tops of the mountains. A strange site above the arid, sun-baked plains.

David Hockney exhibition in Bilbao

Last month we went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao to see the David Hockney exhibition which had transferred from the Royal Academy. We were so lucky; instead of having to confront heaving crowds of people, it felt as though we had the place to ourselves! And that's just what you need to see the huge landscapes he's been painting.

I was just bowled over by the intensity of the colours he uses, but also the range of different palettes he employs for the different seasons or light conditions.

In the video documentary he talks about how everyone's perception of a place or a view is literally coloured by their memories. Interesting that many of these works are painted in the studio, from charcoal sketches and photographs. And so the colours he's choosing are quite personal. I'm sure I could sense that emotional connection he has with the places he's painting.

I'm also drawn to his use of multiple canvasses with slightly different viewpoints which together make up one image, but with a slightly broken-up, patchwork quality which reflects how we take in and perceive places.

And the exhibition went on and on...watercolours, sketchbooks, smaller scale works done on the iPad.


Then there was the iPad stage by stage construction of a couple of his works. You could see how he started, what he added when, how he changed the format half way through and then the final work.
I must practice a bit more with our iPad... I mess around on the iPod with the Doodle Buddy app, which is a much simplified version. Somehow limited choice means you can't get too fussy, which makes for clearer, simpler images. I wonder whether having so much more choice about everything on Brushes will muddy the outcome - it will certainly freak me out!

Growing veggies

As the weather warmed up, I was pulled into the garden by some invisible veggie-magnet. I'd spent dark winter evenings planning what to plant where, and from April onwards I've been creating a real 'potager' based on my plan, but somehow it never quite turns out how I expected. The plan has all the planting so far marked in coloured pencil.

And here are a few pics of the plants themselves:


A red pepper and aubergine between salad leaves




Courgette and squash



Borlotti beans, french beans, mangetout peas and broad beans

So far I've learned that there just isn't the space to grow everything, and that it's better to have a larger amount of plants all growing at the same time, to get a single meal's worth of a crop at once (other than salad leaves etc), rather than lots of smaller amounts of different things, or successional sowings, both of which I'd prepared on my plan.  I'm learning as I go....Soon I'll have to start another plan for next winter/spring.....

Ben Nicholson, Picasso and Mondrian

A recent visit to London and the chance to see a couple of exhibitions; Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain and Mondrian and Nicolson at the Courtauld.

As a result, I'm championing Ben Nicholson - for the feelings of warmth and calmness his work evokes in me. The colours are frequently a subtle mud, and textural, reminding me of old sacking, and the forms often repeat the most essential of mathematical shapes; circles or rectangles, while other fine lines might scribble across the surface.

 The Tate exhibition showed Nicholson picking up on Picasso and Braque's development of cubism with his well known Au Chat Botte:

The Courtauld exhibition was concerned with the couple of years in the 1930s when Nicholson and Mondrian lived in Hampstead, and how their work evolved as a result of their friendship. It was the start of Nicholson's white paintings, where light hitting the different levels of the work created shadow lines. Very subtle, very clever, but then by all accounts he was.

I was also much taken by his paintings of abstract blocks of colour, which used his muted palette to create depth, where the Mondrian reaffirmed the flat surface with his primaries.

Third time lucky for the roses

I've been looking at my painting from time to time, and concluded that it was just too bright and happy. The day I painted it was bitterly cold, and I'd intended to convey that frostiness, but the colours got in there and drowned out that thought....but how to push them back?

At the beginning of this month I thought I'd try some multi-media additions of tissue paper, just leaving the red roses peeking through, but the tissue I had was too thick:

However when I pulled it off, it had left some fabulous textural marks with the diluted white paint I'd used to attach them to the surface...so there I have it: the marks made by the tissue give just the amount of opacity I wanted. A very happy accident!

I'm still deciding whether the trunk on the left needs the same treatment, and I think I'm going to emphasise further the red of the roses - they may even get enormously enlarged, then I want to do something to strengthen the iron ring top left to balance them.

Otherwise I've been in the garden, getting very excited about seeds that are sprouting, so any art has been a bit neglected of late. But a trip to London is sure to inspire me......

Escher and the Alhambra tessellations

A small exhibition, also in the Alhambra, showed some of M C Escher's prints, and a short animation someone had done based on his Metamorphosis series, where a chequerboard turns into birds and fishes, or newts, or frogs. They'd linked them all together and the result was very lively.

See the official websie of his work here. The Metamorphosis prints are at the end of the page in Picture gallery entitled "Recognition and Success 1955 - 1972".

So much of the Moorish pattern making was based on tessellations of multiple shapes. I marvelled at the skill of the craftspeople to keep the repetitions aligned.

I also found this site, http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/minitext/escher/#tess which explains Escher's methodology, and his inspiration from visiting the Alhambra.

A week in Spain

It's taken me a bit of time to appreciate all that we saw in a week. The inland plateau of Spain is so very different from anywhere else in Europe I've been to. It reminded me of Australia - the dry red earth, sparse vegetation, big blue skies - or the mid West of the USA - wind eroded rocks, empty roads, ramshackle half abandoned villages. Then as we got further south, there were olives as far as the eye could see, making mathematically precise patterns across the hillsides. I did a few Doodles on my iPod Touch:

The last doodle is my impression of our last day - we had a long drive back, but within 15 mins of setting off we hit quite heavy snow, crossing a high plateau on small country roads, the car started to skid and I thought we were lost!

The highlight of the visit was the Alhambra in Granada. The workmanship in the Nasrid Palace was just awesome! Every surface was decorated, with intricate carvings in plaster or stone, and tessellated ceramics on the floors and lower walls.

 

I was a bit confused to read that originally all this decoration was coloured red, yellow and blue. That would have made it overpoweringly sombre, whereas now, the pale ivory walls give texture and light. The busyness of the incredibly complex patterns is calmed by the uniform colour of the  plaster.

Aparently a British architect called Owen Jones studied the decoration of the Alhambra palaces in detail in the 1880s and was very influential in persuading Victorian interior decorators to adopt the Moorish colour schemes.  

I was interested to find patterns in the pebbled courtyard which reminded me of Celtic patterns: 

I want to do something similar on our terrace now, but I need to find some good pebbles...

red roses - week 2

Back to Maureen's garden with plans to tone down the ochre and create a more wintry feel to the whole canvas. Also working on modelling the branches etc and creating greater depth. It's still not finished, but it's going in the right direction (I think).

And I added the roses in, as the last thing I did, but they need to be brighter. Roses in January....I've also got a strawberry ripening in my garden....it must be global warming. But today we've got snow, so I think that will finish off the roses and the strawberry....we'll have to wait till later in the year.

Wickerwork bird feeder

Sometimes it's good just to get the fingers working...I went to a workshop to learn how to make a bird feeder using traditional basketmaking techniques.And here's the result:

We started with 7 thick hazel twigs to make the structure of the base, weaving lengths of willow through them to create a circular platform, then adding and bending up finer hazel twigs for the sides, tied at the top, and with a central ring of woven willow to keep the shape of the 'cage'. I'm not sure how much the bird's appreciate the design; they're more interested in the fat ball hanging inside.

Out of practice

It's been months since I took a brush in my hands, but a new year, and new intentions, plus the enthusiastic encouragement of Maureen, and here's my first very quick attempt to get paint on canvas...

I'd been struck by the small bright red roses still blooming in Maureen's garden, against the greens of the hedge and the otherwise wintry feel of the weather. With little more than an hour's worth of time, in bad light, with no preparation, the result is an overly complicated composition, lack of tonal range, and any number of other issues. And I didn't even get to the red roses!

There's not much to be proud of here, but I stick it up to make me work on improving it, so that there'll be a 'before' and 'after', and hopefully the latter will be more interesting than the former...