i have been focusing on some printmaking lately – but today, dear reader, you might like to take a peek inside this recent sketchbook…
last weekend i started & subsequently filled this most diminutive of sketchbooks with some simple line drawings… each sketch is 10cm x 14.5cm…
travelling about with a pocket-sized sketchbook and an ink pen…
here is a selection of some of those small sketches…
observing & remembering the patterns of the natural, material world…
such as a tree slightly leaning, its bark gnarled…
or watching where the water flows…
and where the earth grows…
something can be found…
from looking at the ground…
or somewhere way up high…
in the darkness of a sky…
seeing clouds perhaps, or infinity in the absence of them…
i really like the limitation of size and drawing implement – but it is not planned that way, nor perhaps is it even relevant to my abstract paintings, but if someone was to pack me off to greenland on a drawing expedition i would probably be very happy to go… every artist should draw something everyday for it enables one not just to observe but to think singly & deeply about something, even just for a short time… i always find myself reminded by the simple process of drawing how sometimes it seems so difficult to really understand how another person might think, feel or respond to something, how difficult it is to communicate a personal sense of something that has no adequate means to describe it; but artists will always try and this is what makes art so special…
a while back i conveyed to a very accomplished artist how i felt i had come to a crossroads with anything created in the abstract (i have had similar conversations with many people), about how i felt i was not always succeeding in conveying a genuine feeling about something, without resorting to the means of illustration… there was no answer other than trying to find a new way of getting an aspect of my character into the work… i do not want to drastically change course, but rather i want to consolidate the voice that is undeniably and uniquely me… i guess the truth is, i already have it but i won’t find it by looking elsewhere…
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i was quietly sitting in the garden one sunny afternoon and very soon spied the covert movements of a wood pigeon making a nest. i didn’t know whether it was a male or a female but this particular garden bird rustled in the top of the spindly bamboo with a furious flapping of wings, with a slightly ungainly, shuffling side-step manoeuvre along a very slim-looking branch, finally hopping into the dense greenery. after a short while the wood pigeon would reappear again, waddle its way back along the skinny branch to fly off again. she (or he) would then return a minute or so later with a long strand of meadow grass or a thin twig clasped in its beak and once again make the awkward, sideways shuffle back towards the location of the nest.
a wood pigeon building a nest in the garden – rather conveniently, she/he seemed unruffled when i went in to get the camera, and was even prepared to wait a moment for the close-up…
there is another wood pigeon nesting high up in another tree, hidden among some rambling honeysuckle; she has been sitting on her eggs for four weeks or more… meanwhile, the grumplesome hen of henley house’s own nesting quarters, for all the appearance of wanting to brood herself, has steadfastly refused to lay a single egg since late april… am i to be the brooding, quarrelsome hen or the hard-working wood pigeon?
anyone with a garden and a mind to make something of it will have been busy these last few weeks. i proudly potted up ten small courgette plants grown from seed (that’s zucchini to any passing americans) in early may, five black and five yellow (plain green is just so last year) and placed them outside, only for them to be caught by the first morning frost in what seemed like months – all my green-fingered work instantly undone. one yellow courgette plant has since survived and three of the black courgette plants also appear to be slowly springing back to life from their shrivelled stems… so, ne’er cast a clout ’til may be out (or whatever; i’ll get my coat…)
now, we hope for more characteristic british weather to quench the dusty, arid earth, after what has been the driest (and probably the warmest) april on record. the months of april and may passing us by without a good ol’ fashioned drenching doubtless signals that august will once again be characterised by many days of rain…
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dear reader, it seems like it has been a while since i last wrote, due to a certain ambivalence about the relentless task of blogging (too much of the introspective grouch)… much has happened which is relevant to the life of this contemporary artist, but there is no need to share it here… i had cause to think back five years, to how i assumed that writing a blog might invite some exchange and subsequently change… i realise now that the creative exchanges that i most draw upon tend to come from the small, real world that i actually inhabit… art is art, and everything else is everything else…
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