Suddenly understanding sketching

Dear Diane,

I thought I would bring you to Cafe Lucca in Bath today for rooibos tea and cinnamon biscuits. Although I only come to Bath maybe twice or three times a year I have a favourite seat I make a beeline for. But today I have gone to the sofas on the diagonal opposite side of the restaurant. Daring, huh?! Got to shake things up and try something new sometimes:)

Which, is, as you know, sort of what I have been trying with the sketching. You and Terry Grant have been encouraging me to do this for a long time and I have been Resistant. A little of it was time. There are too many things I want to do already without adding more. But really, it went a lot deeper than that and related to how I defined myself and how I approach life. See.. Look how much hippy-dippy-Haight- therapy talk has rubbed off just from having a Californian friend!!

I am sure I am not alone in having a formative 'bad teacher moment'. in the UK at the end of your third year in senior school you got to do your 'options'. I.e to choose which subjects you would study to exam level for the next two years. Your choice was influenced by your own likes, your teachers guidance and parental influence but oddly the choice was made before the exam results at the end of the third year. Nontheless I clearly remember my art exam that year.

We were given a list of themes beforehand and had to produce a piece of work in a set time which was then graded for the exam. (Because of course all artists produce their best work to time deadlines and art can be graded accurately as right or wrong just like maths.. But that's a rant for another day.) I chose the theme 'Streetlife' and chose to draw with my paper in portrait orientation. Down the left side was the side of a building with a myriad of Chinese neon signs sticking out, the right hand side being night sky. ( For night sky read 'pretty much blank and therefore less work').

Photo from 37days.com

(Photo from www.37days.com)

Mr Barr the chemistry teacher was invigilating. That's the Mr Barr with a comb over and dandruff who still lived wth his parents and always spoiled your 'effort cards' by making it impossible to get a set of straight E for Excellent grades saying that he expected excellence from everyone and so even if you put in superdooper effort you could only get an S for satisfactory. (Of course the fact that he is right and that anyway the scheme was designed to make kids who got really poor achievement grades feel better about themselves because they could be said to have put in excellent effort to get a failing grade is also a rant for another day.)

So anyway, he sidles up and looks at my pencilled in shop signage and asks how I intend to finish it. "With coloured pencils", I told him. He shook his head sadly, "You won't get high marks if you don't use paint. Proper artists use paint." And off he went leaving me feeling a failure before I had even started to add colour. I knew that if I went anywhere near paint I would make a mess of it. Now, I appreciate that, given I was being asked to use poster paint on rough sugar paper, I was not excactly being given a head start with my equippment but then I blamed it entirely on my ineptitude. So I decided that it was better to do the best I could and not do it properly than try to do it properly and mess up. (See how that stupid effort card system worked to stop you taking risks?!)

So, pencils it was and actually, I came third in my class. So yah-boo-sucks Mr Barr. (On a whim I just googled him and found this description of him posted on Friends Reunited .Sarky’ Barr – Prone to uncontrolled sarcasm and chemistry tests with a pass mark of 100%. Had the capacity for genuine human compassion but kept it very well hidden. And also this one I remember being terrified of Mr Barr's verbal Chemistry tests. If you got an answer wrong you had to stand on the chair, if you got a second answer wrong on the chemistry lab bench. I remember that it was usually me and Gillian Boulter who would end up on the bench, with everyone looking up at us. Unfortunately, short skirts were also in - cringe!!Nice legacy he left in all our memories then! I remember that he refused to mark work nor written in fountain pen.) I dropped both art and would have dropped chemistry except it was compulsory and so I went on in life labelled as 'not a proper artist'.

Which might not have mattered if it wasn't for my perfectionist personality. Why do something if you can't do it properly? Waste of time when you could be doing something you can do properly. And its not enjoyable to know that you are not doing things properly. Not for me anyway. I don't mean that its not enjoyable to learn how to do something properly. It certainly is. But in this context there was no point getting a third place in art because I got a third in something of no value because it wasn't proper art. I was just less inept at doing it improperly than someone else was.

And so I trundled on in life having been strongly encouraged to take all the accademic exam options and being told not to choose typing or child care as I considered because 'they were really for the bottom sets'. And now I spend my work life making judgments with no childcare qualifications on how people bring up their children and typing whole family law books out very badly. Go figure.

Anyway, to come back to the point ( its sitting on this sofa - its making me all analytical) I was defined from early days as an accademic not an artist and I knew ( believed?) that I had no talent for doing perfect representational paintings. Which is why quilting was something I so warmly embraced because it was creative, artistic even and required no painting.

So, sketching to me was a nice activity for other people that just wasn't me. I like to look at your sketchbooks, I really do, but I have no desire to draw a lemon for the sake of drawing a lemon. What do I do with it? What is if for? Ooops, sorry, I had a moment of chanelling my Mother there! Journalling I took to like a duck to water on the other hand. Words are fine. They are in the academic camp where I belong. Drawings? Primary school and bottom set or people who do it properly like David Hockney. Not me. Just not who I am.

Then As I mentioned on Down the Well I found Danny Gregory's books Creative Licence and Illustrated Life. I enjoyed seeing those quirky casual drawings and started to admire them from afar. But I didn't make a connection to them. Danny Gregory is an advertsing executive not a lawyer. He is supposed to draw and clearly he does it properly for his field. And he has time in the morning to draw his breakfast.Huh. Not in my house. So I kind of began to wish I was the kind of person who did sketch but knew that 7am bagel illustration was not me or my life. I wrote in this post about setting up an Osterley Filofax with paper so I could sketch and I did do some half hearted doodling in there but I was not really committed to it.

 

Then I found the Urban Sketching book and somehow the penny clanged right into my vacuous brain. First: these are people like me. They like what I like, to travel, to meet up, to observe people in cafes. (2pm cakes in a cafe are entirely different animals to 7am bagels at home!) Secondly, they are not even trying to produce a perfect painting. Not even a beautifully balanced and delicate spread about a lemon. They capture a memory of travel, of place of people. (Note to childhood self: they draw Hong Kong with pencils if they feel like it). They keep journals which are about their life experiences not fruit. Unless they happen to spend a day eating fruit in which case those bananas are fair game. And they are a community.

One quote from the book in particular struck me for its obviousness. One guy advised not spending too much time on a sketch otherwise it becomes a painting. I looked at the examples, done with intricate ink lines or hard scribbly markers, with pencils and fountain pens (Mr Barr ought to at least be accepting of that!). Some even let their watercolours go outside the lines! And suddenly, without warning, I was into sketching. I had found a way to connect to it that allowed me to feel I was doing it properly and that it was something that a person like me was allowed to do.

I decided to give it a time limited trial. I had two train journeys to London and a fortnight here. I devised a Project ( its official if you call it a Project, did you know that?!) in which I was to try out one sketchbook for that time only. The Project was not to do it to my perfectionist satisfaction. It was to do it. If, after that time I got no pleasure from it then I would set it aside and move on.

On my first train journey I drew this man. And this one.

And then I sat there thinking: they actually do look like that! And I did that! Me! I did it properly. And it was fun!

So I kept going. For specific inspiration I googled 'Bath Sketches' and found Ed of the Mostly Drawing blog. He invited visitors to Bath to contact him so I did and togethet we formed Bath's first urban sketching sketchcrawl. Very cool! Ed is a teacher and a lovely warm personable guy and was exceedingly generous with the knowledge he has accumulated over the last couple of years since he too was drawn in by Danny Gregory's books. We met in the choir stalls in Bath Abbey and I was able to look through his self-bound sketchbooks and try his kit out before we set out to a cafe to litter the table with said kit and sketch. This is his sketch of me to prove what I was doing!

I realise that if I am going to do this, it is important to me to do it in a way that reflects my personality and that the tools and results reflect what I understand work for me and not someone else, whilst at the same time I want to take every opportunity to learn from others. So I was very intererested in what Ed has to say about the paper he uses and why. I saw how he bought a job lot of out of date moleskine diaries and used the covers to bind in watercolour paper. The results are personal, practical, cheap and every sketchbook including his current one has 2012 embossed on the cover... I cannot tell you how bananas that would drive me!!

Down here I am using two small sketchbooks, a gorgeous leather bound Windsor and Newton cartridge paper one that you cannot get anymore which has been in my cupboard being intimidating for years. And a Moleskine watercolor pocket book. Which has a very annoying thin shape and orientation.

I did consider trawling the second hand ( sorry, this is Bath, antiquarian) book shops and finding covers to reuse. ( I have just read and highly recommend A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Oskei in which the diary key to the plot is made in that way) I understand the logic of the bound book ( continuity, portablity, telling a continuous story) but also know that I like new beautiful covers that feel good in my hands with total flexibily of paper. So.. You know where this is going, don't you?!....

An A5 filofax will obviously work. Would a personal? Wouldn't the rings get in the way? Nope. Not even if I do a full page spread. I just hold the pencil differently and draw around them. I used pencil only here because I only had very thin Filofax paper in the Malden at the time. Its not even a good pencil, its the mechanical plastic ones you get in hotel rooms. It also works if I turn the pages to landscape orientation.

And it was lovely to hold which is going to help me be motivated to pick me up. i can always fold bigger paper in and the pockets will be great for carrying colour mix charts. But this Malden is earmarked for my yoga binder ( containing class schedules, pose instrutions and benefits, sequencing instructions, mediatation notes etc) So I had to grab another one in grey, cheap from Amazon warehouse. Shame! You will notice that these urban sketches are the kind of urban sketches you do at midnight in a hotel room when there is nothing urban to draw :)

So, my plan is to equip myself with different papers and try out different media as I go and make this very much a visual journal. I have all those tins of stuff that you tied me down and made me buy at the Pencil Museum, remember? A personal sized filofax is portable enough for me. But I also often use a pocket as a wallet and can carry oages to draw on in that too should I want to. As I plan to do with my word journal which is also now in a filofax, for archiving I will make beautiful covers and bind with book rings at the end of the year so each book can ( to please my OCD) have matching covers with the right year on the front. Ahem. And of course there is a whole new world of shopping opening up to me including things like Noodlers Lexington Grey ink that you cannot get here and which is likley to arrive at your house for me a few days before I do!! Ed used this in waterbrushes, neat and diluted to paint with and add watercolour over in places - it was very effective.

I am still struggling with making the pages feel they have a point to them ( other than at the moment, just being a for the sake of learning kind of page) and with intrusive bouts of self loathing at the standard of what I do. ( Yes, yes, I know. Its been three weeks, I am not supposed to know anything!). But I shall perserve. If you look at mabeloos on flickriver.com you will see this page where she sketches right along her to do lists and daily diary which is interesting and inspiring. And scary for those of us used to nice neat worded planners! And also how she put watercolour pages into her Malden. I am such a copy cat. If only I could copy her art that well!!

I was chatting to a filofax seller earlier this week and she said she kept two diaries in hers, one for her plans and one to deal with her Mother's life as her Mum had Alzheimers. Maybe I should have two - one for the lawyerly wordy neat side of my personality and behind another tab one for my artist self! It would be quite fun to put in entirely fictitious appointment entries too don't you think? The life I wished I was living today. Or an armchair travel diary . Tab one: 10am, windowless courtroom in Northern England. Tab two 10 am, yoga class, beach, Bora Bora with sketch of me in tree pose under a palm tree. I found this little gallery quite fun too.

At the moment I am seeing this more as an extension of my journalling than my art quilting but I am very open to seeing how, if at all, they begin to blend. One major irritation I have always had with the concept of designing in paper for quilts is that the colours would never be extactly the same. Well, duh! I can fill waterbrushes with dye solution and work on paper. So obvious! Ed wonders whether I will end up sketching direct onto cloth. We will see, but I can see maybe sketches becoming screens rather than starting with manipulated photos. A big challenge will be finding time.

Speaking of which, my Brick Lane transition quilts are here with me having the final hand stiching put on. I need to get on with them as they need to go off for the Uttoxeter show soon.

And I need to have a poke about the internet and choose a hotel in Stockholm. We hope to go in July and I hope to be confident enough so do some good travel journal pages by then.

In the meantime, to stop you feeling aggrieved about the lemon comment I went to the fruit stall outside the Thai Restaurant where we had lunch ( it had taken all day and a tour of Bath eating places to finish this post!) and drew some fruit.

I really could do with you getting over here sometime soon and showing me how to do it better.

Love,

Helen

 

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Forward Movement

Did I ever show you this small quilt I did in a mini group quilt challenge years ago?  The theme was "coffee and cream" and this was my response.  (The mini-group preceded 12x12, and was short lived because the 6 of us lived too far apart and getting together was just too inconvenient.)  Anyway, this came to mind because I was thinking about how bad I feel about not posting here, and how totally uninspired I've felt in terms of creating art, and how I've been relying on coffee a lot for energy during a period when I've been feeling rather dull.

The dullness, as you know from our emails, comes I think from this time of big emotional processing.  And, I think, my creative impulses have been consumed in other areas -- changing some things in the house, figuring out garden and decor plans, etc.

But I have the double-edged sword of an impending deadline.  Some months ago I agreed to submit a piece to a quilt exhibit and the deadline is approaching.  The bad news is that I don't feel like doing anything at all.  The good news is that this deadline is pushing me to do something despite my case of the Art Blahs.  So I have been pushing ahead and I know I will be glad to have done this.

Some good things are coming out of having to do this.  I've been reminded of how much I like working in this collage style of fiber art.  Although I've done this sort of thing over the years (look, that coffee and cream was this style, too), I've used different processes.  I still haven't settled on one that I love.  In this case, this piece is quite big so I'm sort of free-cutting and creating the image as I go.  At any rate, I'm about to get to the quilting/thread painting part and that will move it along quickly.  (A side note:  I remembered, too late, that I should have laid this on top of the batting and backing already layered together.  But no, I didn't do that.  SO I have to transfer this to batting which will be tricky as it's not fused, it's tacked lightly in place.  Ug.)

But what I really wanted to talk about here was the subject of sketching.  I knw you have been sketching a lot while on your vacation in Bath, and I'm interested to hear how, after that week has ended, how you've felt it went. Did you enjoy it? Did you find that your process, or your approach to it, changed over the week as you did more?

Over Easter weekend, while visiting my friend to help her after surgery, I found time to sit out on her patio and do a bit of painting.  I signed myself up for an online class from Jane LaFazio to give myself a kick start back into doing this.  As I've told you, I like Jane's classes a lot because she's so enthusiastic and positive, and makes drawing and painting so accessible.  I like the loose style she encourages and find that sort of thing very freeing.  Our first week's task was fruit, and I did this:

 It reminded me that I've got lots of issues to improve on (not the least of which is my tendency to overwork things) but it was very fun.  Looking at it now brings me right back to the porch where I was sitting, the scent of the sliced lemon, the feel of the springy breeze... It was a very nice hour.

I took a stab at painting some dogwood blossoms from a tree blooming in my friend's backyard.  The individual sketches aren't horrible, although I did even worse in the over-working problem.  And then I thought I'd try to unify things on the page, and got to this point, which clearly needs more to pull this together.  I'd call this Not a Success.  Still, it was enjoyable doing it.

 
So I am starting off April with the goal of getting back to sketching more regularly -- twice a week, at least, is my goal for the month.  It has made me think again of putting a small table in the family room for sketching while I listen to/watch tv in the evenings.  Hmmmm.

I feel a bit like I'm starting to pull my feet out of quicksand.  I suspect I'll be making muddy tracks for a while yet...

Visting the Tate

Dear Diane,

I know that you are laid low in your sick bed so this is a letter to entertain you and give you something to read on your Ipad which,knowing you, I am sure is on your pillow with your tissues and medication.

In my last post I promised to tell you about my visit to the Tate Liverpool to see an exhibition about drawing. As always with the Tate there was not inconsiderable scratching of the head. Both at their definitions ( how is photography drawing?) and at the quality of what is on offer. I have learned over the years how to tackle a Tate exhibition though, taking into account my nature. Which is that in museums I have great starting enthusiasm but actually the attention span of a gnat and that I don't like paying money to be taken for a ride.

My method is to walk through relatively quickly. Window shopping. I note my instinctive reactions which usually fall into three catagories:

• Ohhhh! Now thats clever, I like that.
• Blah.
• What the ...? How did that get here?

Then I walk the gallery again, not necessarily in any sensible order. The Blah stuff I tend to skip. I know.I might learn more if I didnt but .. Gnat Head. Got to do what I can do and no more. the Blah stuff is anyway usually stuff I can see the merit of but its not my style and it just doesn't trigger inspiration for my own work. So Monet, good work, lad, but will you excuse me while I go and spend time with this conceptual artist over here?

Now in this exhibition there were four artists I wrote down to show you that particularly struck me. Three of which I had not heard of before. So that list alone is worth the entrance fee.

The first one, I did know. William Kentridge. I was immediately attracted to him becuse he is South African so there is an interest before we start for me. He does animations based on drawings. Here is one of them

Clever. Amusing. There were four on a big screen. I watched one and a half. (Gnats head). He can clearly draw in the technical sense. His sketches are what I would have said good drawing was before I went. There is a video of him talking about his process here........

Oh that reminds me there was one of Henry Moore's London Blitz drawings too. Again good to look at. These works engendered in me a reaction of : sigh. If only I could do that....

Then there was Oskar Kokoshka and his London Drawings

 

I found these quite encouraging. Scribbly. I could do that. Of course if I did they would not end up in the Tate because of the mysterious and unknown art world mechanisms of designating who is an Artist and who has a nice hobby. But, last time I checked my life plan it did not include being shown in The Tate, so thats Ok. (Although, should any curators be reading this I can change my life plan at any time and it was with a great deal of postmodern irony that I failed to make my bed this morning. My contact details are in the sidebar.) But seriously, the Tate is in a great bit of Liverpool architecturally speaking and it is walkable on a lunch hour for the new job I will start in May. These pictures made me want to buy a sketchbook and plan to come out once a week to scribble draw.

Right opposite his work was stuff by a man whose name I forget, so annoying was he. He liked to lie in a field for hours at a time and then draw the interpretations of life he came up with as a result of his pastoral contemplations. He produced a white square and a blacksquare with a few pencil marks. Frankly, the man might have much of worth in his head but he was not expressing it well. My reaction to this was of the "Oh purleeese.." variety. However thinking about it later ( whilst of course lying in a puddle staring at the underside of a cow) I decided that its worth lay in the lesson it taught rather than the physical work. That lesson being: its OK to make crap art.

Actually, I am not being facetious. ( well, I am, but I have a serious point too). Fear stops me being a drawer. Fear of mediocrity. But you know this guy is not mediocre. Far, far worse. And he got into the Tate. And I presume in allowing that to happen he also got over his fear that ignorant bloggers who don't understand why in fact he is not worse than mediocre were going to take pot shots at him online. And that makes him one cool man in my opinion.

Then down the hall was Spilt Nude by Fiona Banner. This I was capitvated by. Have no idea why is a drawing but I did not care. Indeed I was pleased. Maybe I can draw after all if this is drawing.Unfortunately the online images do not make clear the text. I have no idea why this is called Split Nude though.

Finally there was Matthew Monahan with his body Electric Series. This was the one that made me want to leave. But in a good way. Leave to go home and be creative.

These very modern works look medieval. They are like rubbings, yet not. Like xrays, yet not. They are made by scraping oil coated boards with a fork which is plain original and fun. They are like the drawing kits you used to get as a kid where you scraped away layers of crayon to get white lines, yet they are not childish. And there is a whole series of them which means this man has concentration and stickablity, great and necessary qualities in an artist.

There was more stuff, but after a while we went for Pizza.

Get well soon,

Love,

Helen.

 

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Working on Brick Lane

Dear Diane,

This is a bonus post from me because I wanted to tell you about my evening in the studio last night and I thought our friends might like to read and see the photos too. All the good stuff is in here.. Would you like to see inside?

 

OK, you can but first some background....

You will recall that I am in a newly formed group here and we are starting out by making quilts or embroideries to the theme of 'Transitions' with a view to entering them all together into a public show. To make our group work cohesive we are working around a grid of sixteen inch squares ( for the quilt, no particular measurement for the embroidery) of three rows of four columns. I decided my interpretation of Transitions was going to be about immigration and I began by looking at the area of Brick Lane in London which has seen several waves of immigraton over the years : Hugenot, Jewish, Irish, Bengali and now recently, Somali.

The thinking work started in September when I went to take some of the photos you see here, and the first thing I wanted to say is that it is interesting how my initial ideas have refined themselves. Initially I wanted my quilt to reference all those groups and to show the way the area changed. Increasingly as I have 'worked on it' ( in inverted commas because until yesterday there was no fabric and the work was mostly talk! ) it has become narrower and narrower until now I am focusing only on the Bengali community. And there is enough there for a series before I return to the other communities.

I wrote over at Plan • Create • Succeed about my new system of Focus words. I think my Focus word for the studio at the moment should be FOCUS!!

Anyway, I took some of the photos and played on Photoshop and also got Dennis to do some writing for me, because I hated my own writing when I tried to do a screen even though I like it when I write directly in my african quilts. Go figure! Then I ordered a stack of thermofaxes. Then yesterday it was time to play and learn how to use them. I mean, I knew how to get the paint through them, but what I have no experience of is how to intergrate them into the kind of multi layered design that was in my minds eye.

I allowed myself to just 'waste' some fabric ( I kept notes, I can replicate the handdyed stuff!) and then put the results in a design book. This in itself is a breakthrough. I don't DO samples.. But for this, it seems I do. Stuff actually improved a lot when I trimmed it down and arranged it nicely!

Here are some pages for you to see what I was dong until one am this morning.

I thought that things started to improve when I dragged out some monoprints and rubbed fabric I had made with no purpose in a class ( or in the case of the rubbed fabric, when the builders revealed amazing plaster texture on the wall when they ripped out my kitchen!).

Black is too harsh on these samples but I like the sense of transition from night to day. The view is down the famous Petticoat Lane looking from the Brick Lane end.

This next one I particularly like for its sense of Islamic mystery. The silver screen over the monoprint is the pattern from the metal minaret in Brick Lane Mosque. Who is she? Where is she going?

These were unsuccessful prints but when I cut them out and in the case of the right hand side one masked off the skirt and added words, I really liked them,.

They gave me the idea to go in this direction.

But by then it was way past bedtime and I had to stop.I feel like there is a lot of work to be done yet and I know that the piece whch has to be done by April will probably not be the best one in this series ( for surely, it is a new series?!) but I am really excited about wher this is going and all I have to learn about it.

The frustrating thing is that this work would be so much easier if I had the wet studio ready. Work started this week and I have just done a post here on my own blog showing the conditions these samples were made in and explaining the little accident I had in the early hours...

And next time I really will tell you all about the Tate visit!

Helen.

 

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That De-Cluttered New Year Feeling.

Happy New Year!

I too love the new start, clean slate feeling and it was interesting to me in the days running up to New Year to notice just how your physical surroundings can affect that feeling.

Work on my new wet studio starts this week ( in fact as I am scheduling this so we are back on a Friday posting schedule after the holidays, so it should be two days into progress by now.) In preparation for that we had had to clear the garage out as the plan is to convert that into an area for laundry and surface design. (No, NOT at the same time!).

This was how it was just before the final sort out. Much was rubbish but much was also equipment for dying or old financial records that I was obliged to keep for a number of years and which had been languishing in here since the house move. So all those things went up to my studio where they sat in huge piles cluttering up my reading nook. They were not in the way of the work area of my studio at all but I noticed that their looming presence was discouraging me from going to the studio and was hindering my creative thinking. I felt my whole head was overcrowded and cluttered.

I didn't take a photo of that period but eventually I spent a couple of hours sorting and shifting and now it is all crammed into my studio bathroom cupboard. Still, as you can see less than idea,. But behind the wall of stuff everything is categorised into ordered boxes ready for transporting to the completed studio.

And it did make a huge difference. I was back in the spacious studio and I felt free to get back to work. And almost immediately I shifted all the furniture around and erected a greenhouse in my studio. I know. Bizarre. But I am excited to have the opportunity to display a piece of work in an open air event in Belgium and I thought that extending my recent works involving African Shacks to, um, an actual shack would be fun.

This is it showing the beginning of the inside lining only at the moment. The plan is to hang art on the inside as well once the actual structure is made. So, sister, I fully hear what you said about using your space differently and effectively. So very important.

As for New Year Goals, I was quite surprised when I reviewed my year. The SAQA Visioning Project year runs October to September and in October 2011 I set myself some goals. At that stage I had just moved into the new studio and what I was really aiming at was establishing a good serious studio habit and, basically, justifying the cost of said studio! I said that in a twelve month period I wanted to make 9 large works and 15 small and the response was generally along the lines of: seriously? When?!

In the middle of that visioning year I had a disaster with a quilt I had put a lot of time into and I decided that the overarching aim of a studio practice had been established and that the specific goals were no longer achievable or even needed. So I just reverted to maintaining time in the studio. Indeed in October this year when the new Visioning Year started I revised my goals away from production targets to what I termed being a 70:30 artist. I.e. if my studio and full time day job time were totalled up, art ( including writing) would be 30% or 51 hours a month

When I reviewed my year on 1st Jan, I was not surprised to see I had beaten my time target but I was pleased to see I accidentally almost met the abandoned goal in that I made

6 completed large works with one still in progress and half done and one abandoned very near completion (Large was defined as one side over 25 inches but most of these were much much bigger than that)

14 small works with one ( the 20/12 disasterous Sweet quilt) half done.

Of course my initial reaction was ; darn! What I could have done if I had really tried!! You are so right when you said of us that ' we feel the things we haven't done more keenly than we feel the awareness of what we've accomplished'.

So, it seemed to me that my system was working and that no major overhauls were needed but at the same time I wanted to consider a plan for 2013. In the end I have come up with a Trimester Plan that I think is quite kind to myself:

Trimester One ( January to end of March)

I will complete the following projects:

1. Complete my African Shack for Belgium

2. A quilt based on Brick Lane with the theme of Transitions for my local Etcetera group challenge ( to be entered at the Uttoxeter show) this must be based on a grid of 3 x 4 sixteen inch squares .

3. Complete another quilt for Uttoxeter which I do not wish to show until nearer the time ( because it is a surprise for someone who will see it there for the first time but which is almost done and is HUGE!!

4. Finish my 20/12 Sweet quilt ( which should have been done in 2012 but I had a melt down)

5. Complete an embroidery for the Uttoxeter show again following the Etcetera Group Challenge requirements for basing the work on Transitions and a 3 x 4 grid of squares.

6. Oversee the work on the wet studio and equip the room fully ready for surface design work.

7. Participate in the quilting community, specifically the Etcetera Group and SQAQ online groups

I would also like to complete a quilt for the SAQA Text Message challenge but I have placed this as an added extra on the list due to the size of the other projects.

At Easter I have a two week holiday then commence...

Trimester Two ( Mid April to Mid -September)

Play in the wet studio. And if I like take the results and play with them in the dry studio

That's it. Isn't that a great goal? No chance I can fail on that one J

I tend to think ahead of myself. I have all kinds of ideas all of which require me to be proficient at things I have not really had much ( or any) experience of yet due to the constraints of my space. So this is my time. I do have a list of methods to try and, because I loathe noodling around with no purpose at all, I will be vaguely making samples with a nod to my current themes of shacks, immigration, text and maps. But I shall allow play and experimentation and mess in the name of finding skills and confidence.

I am so looking forward to having a space where things can be ready to go and if I want to spend 15 mins printing I can because everything is mixed up and to hand. Not like now where wet work requires a sort of room conversion.

Oh and I lied. That's not it. I also have another goal to build up a scrapbook of inspirational images to keep in the studio. I also anticipate that I will want to sew so this is my time to make some easy, fun lap quilts with all the fabric I bought on my Round the World Trip. I actually anctipate getting a little ( OK, a lot) annoyed with myself and my lack of immediate skills as I start something new so some improvisational piecing will be good therapy.

Trimester Three (Mid September onwards)

I will be attending a class at Committed to Cloth called...... with Clare Benn. I have been wanting to do this for ages and I am determined that I am going to be ready for it so I can go with purpose and learn and work intention to make the most of my five days. So the Trimester two builds up to that. Immediately after that class I intend to review what I have learned and, taking into account what calls for entry are around for my various groups, and what excites me to work with then, I am going to go back to setting some serious productivity goals.

Do you know what I mean if I say that this feels like a 'spacious' year? I feel like I have room ( literally and figuratively) to grow into my self this year, without too much pressure, and I am excited about that. I think maybe a rotating pattern of hard production months interspersed with a more deliberate fallow and learning/ experimentation process might work well for me generally. We shall see. I also hope to get to reading some of the creativity books on my list over this period.

You asked to see how I have altered my filofaxes to fit with my new year goals. Well, I haven't much really. I rejigged some sections in my studio journal (A5 Ochre Malden) and put new tabs on them, but the basic contents are the same. The new stuff is a list of suggestions to myself and equipment list of the new studio. And I started to use the purple A5 Malden for samples and surface design notes but that is still a work in progress. I am hoping it will get FAT in the new studio!

And the Focus system I wrote about over on Plan Create Succeed works for the studio work too, especially for the present when I really have to focus to get all my projects completed.

Now, I was going to tell you all about my visit this weekend to Tate Liverpool and what I learned from it, but this post is too long already so I shall save that for next time.

Until then,

Helen.

 

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New Year, New Goals

Happy New Year to you!

Isn't it amazing how the turn of a new year can bring such a feeling of a new start? There's nothing to prevent one approaching every day as its own fresh beginning, of course, but there is something about the start of a new year, and new calendars, that creates a feeling of new possibility.  There are some big new things ahead for me, so I am setting some new goals, restating and refining some existing ones, and generally trying to get myself a bit more organized so I'm moving forward with the things I want to, in the ways I want to.  Hah.  Look at how many times I used the word "new" in that paragraph.  You can tell I'm ready to embrace some changes!

We were talking about sketchbooks.  You know, you complained that I didn't show you messy sketchbook pages after I'd talked about feeling free to be messy -- and I suppose messiness is in the eye of the beholder. (Now, there's a slogan to print up for a poster!) But you are right, it's the freedom to be messy and not worry about what the outcome looks like that has defined the shift in my attitude about keeping sketchbooks.  I used to worry about keeping things looking pretty and artful, and then I'd get panicky and pressured about whether what I was about to do would be GOOD ENOUGH and it'd stall me before I'd even start.  Now I try not to worry about it.

But truthfully, I've not touched the sketchbooks much in the weeks since I posted my entry.  Holiday events have intervened, which have cut into my sketching time by a fair amount.  And I had to switch over from painting to work on the last 12x12 challenge quilt, which meant putting the paints and sketchbooks away to make room for fabric on my worktable.  You'll remember my response to the theme "Sweet" inspired by millefiori candy:

I don't think I made any sketches at all for this -- it went from my head to drawing a grid out on newsprint to figure out how it all would fit into the required 12x20 size, and then I started playing with fabric and wonder-under to assemble each of these little candies.  I think that for this project, I had that same reaction you described of having the image in my head, and not wanting to take the time to work it out in sketch form because that would take away the fun of doing it in fabric.

But as we head into this new year, I know that both of us have shifted away from art sketchbooks for the moment and are instead sitting with our respective Filofax journals to focus on goals and year-end assessment and planning for the new year.  As is evident from your Plan Create Succeed blog, you are far more advanced than I am at goal setting and planning and organizing what you want to achieve into lists and checklists and such.  You continue to inspire me, and I continue to learn from you as you talk about how you approach your planning.

My approach to planning and goal-setting has evolved a fair amount over the past year, so I feel good about applying what has worked to the coming year, and continuing to work on using planning tools to help me.  Today, I pulled out my list of goals for 2012, and spent some time journaling about how they went, what I achieved, and what I discovered that will affect how I move forward in my progress.  I've never done that sort of assessment before but I can see its benefits already.

For one thing, stopping to assess what I HAVE done is a good way to get a handle on the amorphous feeling I often have that I haven't done ENOUGH.  I wonder if that's a chronic feeling for people like us who have so many things we want to do -- we feel the things we haven't done (or haven't had time to even try) more keenly than we feel the awareness of what we've accomplished.  So, for me, pausing to list what I've done -- even just counting books read, workshops taken, paintings done, quilts made, etc -- made me realize that I've actually done quite a lot.  That's encouraging and satisfying.

I had the same surprised pleasure when I sat down early last year to make a list of the unfinished quilts I have in my closet, and discovered that the list wasn't as long as I thought it was.  And having them all listed out helped me as I determined which were worthy of finishing and which needed to be abandoned.

My birthday falls on January 31, and although the start of a new calendar year is a significant marker, I've found that using the month of January as a time for reflection and planning and organization has worked well for me.  Plus, this year some big life changes are taking place during January, so by the time my birthday comes my living situation will have changed and things in my daily life will feel significantly different.  So over the coming weeks, I have lots of planning to do.  I'm looking forward to sitting down with my Filofaxes to adjust them for particular purposes, and decorating them to make them more pretty and fun to use, and sorting out goals and projects and task lists.  Many of my goals have to do with changing things around my house -- I want to make some changes to use the space differently and more effectively (so, for example, I can have paint stuff set up in one place and still have a free worktable for sewing and art quilting!)  So I'm not just setting general goals -- I've launched into envisioning changes around the house, and shopping for the things to make those changes possible.   I have a lot I want to accomplish in the coming year!

One of the apps on the Ipad I quite like is called Moodboards, which allows you to create boards combining images and text and graphics for a digital collage.  Here's the one I assembled for 1/1/13:  

You can see it's about being happy and celebrating cheery, cozy comfort at home.

Now, tell me -- what are your goals for the coming year?  And do show me how you've changed your Filofaxes to accomodate them...

By the way, in my email today was an ad for upcoming Potfest pottery festivals -- which brought back a lovely memory of the one we went to together in 2011.  What a lovely day that was! 

love Diane

Stuborn Sketchbook Resistance

Dear Diane,

Your last post made me laugh. You wrote:

"Or maybe I should speak for myself here – I am reassured by seeing a messy sketchbook because it reassures me that I can be messy too. I can get caught up in the belief that my sketchbook has to look nice and pretty. I’m getting a lot better about not worrying about that."

And then you have the temerity to show me a series of pristine neat pages with delicate drawings and neat doodles :) You must have meant that the thought in your head that it would be OK to be messy is enough to stop you producing anything near mess! Its enough to make me give up. Almost. I'm fine with a design book in which I might jot down ideas to keep me from forgetting them. Or for doodling as I think. I've always done that.

And because it is new to me and I cannot yet predict the results, I will play about with Photoshop filters and print out the results. These were both from a bird's eye view of a township in South Africa. So that storeage of ideas is helpful.

             

And I am fine with inspirational cuttings. I have done paper collages in preparation for fabric work even.

But at that stage I find the books/ pages whatever start to become a hinderance. First, if its down on paper in anything more formed than the doodle, its out of my head and it exists and I have no interest in it anymore. So that Maasi fence might have been fine in black and white lines but I look at the collage and think: yeah, I could make that but, why? Its already there. I prefer the colour and detail experiment to be with the actual quilt. The dynamism of the creation is somehow spent and I am not excited by the prospect of recreating it. its the working things out part of making that is fun and yu can only do that once. Secondly paper does not behave like fabric so a sketchbook page ( using any media other than fabric) as anything other than a memory jogger is not helpful to me.

I know some people like to sketch it out to see what the quilt will look like. Well, if I draw what is in my head its going to look like what is in my head! I think ( and there is no way to say this that does not make me sound arrogant and possibly self deluded so I will just say it and wait for the brickbats) that I am just blessed with a good vision that way.

It was illustrated when we auditioned two builders to build the studio in the then dark and unformed loft space. One company produced for us CAD assisted drawings and architectural plans. Very professional. The second builder came and waved his hands about at dark and inaccsessible corners and described what he would do in imprecise terms like : well we can push that back and put a thingy there to open it up.. I went with the second guy for the whole house because he could in his head exactly what I wanted and I could see in my head the proposed ammendments he suggested. Then we went ahead and had the joy of creating it making changes as we went as we got better ideas. That way was responsive. The company with the plans left me cold. All they did was draw what I had already told them I wanted and then wanted to replicate it. Where was the creativity in that?

That is not to say that we never used sketches. I did draw the tiling plan on the wall in pencil and taped samples of the sequence the coloured tiles should go onto a scrap piece of cardboard. Mostly because i didnt trust a tiler to disingush between slate grey and dove grey! And there were a couple of rough A3 plans I drew simply to confirm the conversations we had to avoid miscommunication in decision making. One copy got tossed in the builders van never to be seen again and the other the lawyer in me filed away in case of litigation. Otherwise? One whole house renovation. No designs. Works a treat!

This is not to say that I don't think I should spend time in the design process. Nor that it is important to see things well, which I understand to be the justification for people drawing a lot. But I am coming to the conclusion ( and this is a developing understanding of how I work best) that my main sketching is in my head. And that you can see and observe without necessarily recreating although no doubt thats one way to do it. I do spend a lot of time just staring at things and processing variations and options in my head. I am probably very irritating to live with as I will often stop participating in a conversation because something has caught my eye. I will stare at it for a while, with a few intakes of breath as if something is about to come out of my mouth, except it never does, my eyes narrow and then, eventually, I will say," Yes. That's it. Sorry? What?" in which time a new design has formed or a solution been found. And usually the end result that goes from head to fabric looks nothing like the item I actually saw, or at least only tangentally so, because it has been processed. Its the observing, thinking and mentally manipulating that produces a result for me.

Its just how I am. So I am not saying I cannot improve. I am saying that I am going to play up my strenghts in how I work rather than trying to be like other people just because it works for them. One thing I am going to do is try to find a little more time and allow a little more self indulgence to look at the things that I find inspiring and to try to play with how to achieve what is in my mind in fabric. So samples maybe more than sketches. Or fabric sketches if you like.

I bought this book recently. JR is an ' anonymous' artist who take photos of women and pastes them lage scale in shanty towns. In one project in Kibera the eyes of the women were pasted on a train that passed their homes .

His art is amazing and meaningful but I find myself drawn not to the faces of the women which is the whole point of the art, but to the corners of the pictures where distressed paint and scraped wood and combinations of planks make exciting combinations. I mean.. Look at the fantastic artyness of Kibera's patterns and textures from the air!

There is a new series on TV here called Spice Trip which is a combination of travelogue and cookery show. This first week they were in Zanzibar cooking cloves and learning their provenance and I was fascinated by the corrogated iron roofs in the background and wanted to find a way to replicate that effect in fabric. S much so that ai was even distracted from the orange clove syrup pancakes. And it takes something to distract me from pancakes! Maybe if I watched on ipad on playback I could take screenshot images for reference. There is a slight discomfort in finding such visual beauty in what are actually apalling living conditions, and yet, it is there.

So, my vague and visionary builder comes to start work on the wet studio in January and I hope that soon thereafter I will be set up to have everything easily on hand to do quick 'sketches' with wet media on/ with fabric. I will see if that, combined with my usual lines drawings for memory will work for me. Not least of all I have yet to play with the silk pen I bought months ago, the accessories for which you have recently kindly posted for me.

All that said, there is one area where I can see that maybe playing in a book in paper could work for me. I am excited to be doing a five day retreat class at Committed to Cloth in September. It is Clare Benn's class on Graphics and Graffiti. It is my first time at the C2C studio and it comes highly recommended so I want to be very prepared and ready to get the most out of it. We are encouraged to bring source material with us and so I will be building a collection of inspiration images and my own preparatory work. This was my excuse for buying this gorgeous ( in my view) scrapbook with pockets last week from Paperchase. Good stuff can get stuck in, bad attempts thrown out and hopefully I will have a lovely inspiring book to work with.

There are three books I have been eyeing to start me off and I think I will order one this afternoon. Or two :)

This one was produced casually at a recent meeting of my art quit group Eteceta by Magie of The African Fabric Shop and she nearly didnt get it back after I spotted it contained art by Wosene Worke Kosrof? Like this, isn't this wonderful? He talks about how in his art he takes the language of his home and transforms it into something new reflecting his experience as an immigrant, which is right up my street! Oooh! I see that if I am prepared to pay a fair bit I can get a old catalogue of his work. Tempting.

This one I think was also hers and I beleive that the author Denie Lachs is someone who has inspired Clare Benn. Certainly she teaches at C2C from time to time. The english version is expensive now so I think I shall get the German edition and practise my language skills. (Its mostly pictures!)

And I found this one by accident browsing the web after I stumbled on the review ( with lots of photos) here. These sketchbooks are very close to written journals which is much more in my comfort zone.

You may like to note that that reviewer has a long list of books about sketchbooks he has reviewed here. Lots of temptation there. Which brings me to a new point and something I constantly struggle with... Where lies the balance between focus and stimulation?

In the last three days alone I have been inspired by Omo Tribe body art, a set of map filofax dividers I saw here, Zanzibarian shacks on Spice Trip, and typography and african fabric design. (Where Magie goes, baskets of mouthwatering fabric follow!). There is so much possibilty, so much to learn how to do and work with and follow through... And so little time! Its a constant dilemma as to which to pick to work with. Do you have that problem? Actually I suppose it is the diametric opposite to the creative block issue you wrote about. I have no doubt whatsoever that focusing down and working in a series produces the best work and I do believe that you can ( maybe even should) work on more that one series at a time. But how many is too many?! And how to decide which to choose and how to know you made the best decison?

Sigh. I don't even have time really to read all the art books I want to. Although, maybe that's conncted the fact I have now been in this cafe for two and a half hours writing this. Probably time to go to the studio!

Love,

H.

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