Some roundel/wheel motifs I traced on my iPad during the week, based on a drawing from 2018 I posted here a few weeks ago. They remind me of stained glass windows, so I'm thinking they could represent lights for my Neruda's boats project. This drawing sticks closely to the colours in the original work, but because I have worked in layers in Procreate I can experiment with the saturation to brighter, more glassy colours. I rather liked the ones below on a dark ground. My iPad serves as a convenient sketch book, not dependent on light quality or space (just as well, because I still haven't put away the Christmas decorations which are boxed up in my work room ready to go into the loft!) Work made this way reproduces beautifully as prints, too. Here are a couple of experiments I already made, playing with colour and direction - and I also couldn't resist making them into a half-drop pattern, which I posted to my Binky blog.
Following on from last week's entry I selected 3 Voynich Manuscript pages as a starting point for some 'part earth, part flower' drawings. Alongside works in their own right, I'm also thinking about my Neruda's boats project (which is growing into a sort of Noah's Ark) - the 'aromas' part of the poem comes to mind, expressing the fragrance of flowers and earth. I chose Voynich images which to my mind are among the most bizarre the manuscript contains, especially if they have root weirdness going on. I made a quick sketch of this one, for the moment just tracing it literally, beginning to think about where I might take it for my own purposes. I liked the way the unreadable text floats around the plant like air, air and what it brings being the other element in the complex alchemy of earth and flower - indicated in the sketch above by squiggles flying around the upper part of the plant. You may wonder, why the Voynich manuscript as a starting point? Of course, it isn't always the way I start, but in terms of plants it fits my head space. I've been pondering the mysteries of the manuscript for years, but no longer try to fathom who created it or why; I have thought at times the drawings look like teenage pranking with secret codes and hastily scribbled flowers, other times I see more sophistication which may be found in the work of a trained artist working at speed. I have even suspected the manuscript may have been compiled by several different contributors. Now I just plug into the spirit of the thing in my own way.
On Wednesday morning, reading Maria Popova's The Marginalian mid week pick-me-up newsletter, I came across this lovely account of one of Virginia Woolf's earliest memories of being in the garden by the large white house on the Celtic Sea coast where she grew up: "I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower." Some of my earliest memories are also of the garden in Rosyth belonging to a sturdy house where my parents lived from when I was about 4 years old. One day I remarked to my mother on the way home from school, observing a hawthorn hedge with its writhing branches springing from the earth on the way home: "Mummy, we live in the roots of the world." There was a very large privet hedge in our garden (I was very small at the time, it probably wasn't as huge as I recall) into which I would secretly creep and explore the roots and low branches in the spaces before the leaves grew. I was suddenly aware that the hawthorn had the same low spaces connected directly to the earth. My parents had a vegetable patch in the garden, which I also inhabited at roots level, full of wonder at how summer flowers somehow gave way to large ruddy beetroots and cabbages and beans later in the year. When I grew older I began to feel I could actually experience and somehow see the energy of sap rising high into trees, the same life-force of nature I strive to convey in my drawings through repeated lines emanating from stems into leaves and flowers.
Virginia Woolf's The Waves left a lasting impression in my mind, I think a revisit is in order (it has been many years since I read the book). Maria Popova's quote got me thinking about combining drawings I made last year from the weird and wonderful Voynich manuscript with my recent ice-inspired sea monsters. They are very rooty looking and make me think of carrots, parsnips, and other root vegetables and flowering herbs. Nothing to do with anything I have been working on recently, just a bit of comedy light relief revisiting some drawings from 10 years ago. I drew these poor dining chairs with my left hand (I am right handed) deliberately so I wouldn't have much control. I suddenly remembered them and had the urge to put one on a T-shirt for work, being an upholsterer I thought it would be a bit of fun. I traced the original drawings in Procreate in a sort of comic-book, animated form which resemble twisted root forms. I rarely share posts with my Binky blog, but if you pop over there you will find coloured versions with added text; if I do get a T-shirt, light hoodie or baseball T's printed to wear to work it will be from my Binky McKee Redbubble. I experimented with different line thicknesses and prefer the one above with finer fill lines, but never having printed anything like this on fabric I'm not sure how well they would turn out or how long they would last after several washes.
Collecting images and putting them together in Procreate to see how they talk to each other, this lobster creature looks as though he is playing the harp with one of the Polynesian navigation chart drawings. I thought it looked like some fisherman's weird dream, perhaps rather a horrid one in which he turns into a sea monster! Fisherman's Blues came to mind as a title, named after one of my favourite albums of all times by The Waterboys. The ocean crests are borrowed directly from one of my Binky McKee book illustrations, the sort of fruitful melting-pot mix Procreate enables which I particularly enjoy. I have been working on making some of the recent images a little larger, which means scaling up and redrawing to keep crisp lines. Because most of them originated a few years ago with no other thought than to use them for Instagram posts at 1080px, they are very small; but I am thinking they might make nice prints, so I'm keeping my options open and increasing the size of canvas. The dimensions of this one would be 289 x 216mm at 300dpi, which is a nice size suitable for the subject matter. Otherwise, if I printed any of the recent compositions some of them would only measure 181mm on the largest dimension, which is a little bit too dinky. I have had this framed drawing lying around in my work room since my 2018 Brave Oleander exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh (eek, I had blonde hair back then, I'm back to my native reddish now!), but during the week I hung it on the bedroom wall. It is daily drawing no.98 from a series I worked in 2016, titled Really Good Coffee. It looks great in its new position. Its sharpness, clarity and brightness has an impact which belies its small scale of 189mm square, and it is great fun - so I am thinking now a revisit might be in order. Accordingly, it has been mentally added to my current Neruda's Boats project. This magpie stage of collecting and bringing together all sorts of aspects of my work is an exciting process.
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Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |