Still looking for ideas to make into fluted or finned pots for the nasturtium drawings, I wasn't turning up much at all. Then I was doodling away while B was watching car repair videos on YouTube and saw a splined shaft on Shed Racing. A Google search later produced lots of interesting shapes! So here is a sketch inspired by - drive shafts. It would appear I was looking in the wrong places for what I had in mind! The way splines catch the light was exactly the idea I had in my head, so I made this quick sketch on iPad.
There were several nasturtium plants all winding around each other in the garden photo I've been using as a reference point for drawing, but keeping in mind I want to make a composition of crazy plants in fluted pots I started separating individual stems from last week's tangle. Trying to work out what belongs to what was a fun challenge. I sketched this on my iPad using an 'ink bleed brush' with a variable line weight, but its delicacy and lightness is making me want to draw with real ink and brush, or even a fountain pen on paper! I've been collecting fluted and ribbed items from around the house, looking for suitable pot suggestions for the plants to inhabit in my drawings. From dainty little egg-cups to Indian carvings in marble and sheesham, I am excited by the differing scales; I have an image in my head of tiny pots next to large ones, which I have begun to explore in the above sketch. In the centre image of the collage below, there is a very large old hand-made ceramic pot which has just always been around. The photo doesn't do it justice, as seen here it could easily be a yunomi - but in fact it measures 25cm in diameter. I love that pot, but don't know who made it; I remember it originally being in my grandparents' house from the early 1960's when I was a very little girl - so perhaps it was made by a friend of theirs, or maybe a serendipitous junk shop find.
I got the printer working (miracle, it's wireless, and will printers ever work first time?) and printed the line drawing I made in Procreate last week. Above is the first stage in pen on semi-opaque paper laid over the print, in my 'portable studio'. The photo looks fuzzy because of shadows cast by the ink drawing over the print. While I was drawing I scribbled a few notes - the foreground pot reminded me of the legs on Gormley's Angel of the North in Gateshead, and I also began to think of umbrellas and other pleated forms. Progress stages above show, top left, a digital version with blacked out background, closely following the original sketch. Top right shows starting to fill the drawing with shading; bottom left shows shading of the outline complete, and the right hand side is just where I wandered with it afterwards. I let it go, although it wasn't what I intended; I wanted to reproduce the original notebook sketch on a larger scale and I'm not sure about the added elements coming from the pots - I had intended focusing on the fluted forms. I'll keep going with this one, though, then perhaps begin again another drawing sticking to the plan.
I decided to begin new explorations into the finned and fluted by recreating the original tiny sketch in one of my 2014 notebooks. It only measures 9cm wide and I want to make it twice that size now, so I took a close-up photo with my phone and transported it into Procreate on my iPad (which, incidentally, is as old as this drawing) and made a basic outline tracing. I will print this digital tracing at the size I want to draw it, so I can retrace it in pen on semi-transparent tissue and make it into a new drawing. It won't be hard to get back into the way I was thinking at the time of doodling the first one, but decisions have to be made - which marks will best suit today's work, where flutes begin and end, what the forms are doing, etc. Giorgio Morandi has been a giant inspiration for me since I discovered his work while attending Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1970s. This is one of my favourites. It is held in the Estorick Collection (lots of info and some phenomenal Morandi works to view here). I love how bizarrely free and joyous the drawing is in spite of the taughtly etched mark-making. Interestingly, he made the etching some 10 years (maybe 12) after the original work - so I don't feel so weird about picking up on something again 10 years after the first version on a 10-year-old iPad. I'm in good company! - and oh boy, I would love to own one of these.
As is often the way, I was looking for something else when I came across this tiny drawing. It got me thinking again about this branch of work which got superseded at the time (probably because it was followed closely by a holiday in Berlin where the art in the streets and galleries opened my eyes to new possibilities of what art could be).
I searched out the notebook to revisit and was surprised it was from nearly 10 years ago, which seems strange; the thought of it in my mind still feels so fresh. Maybe it is fresh because I'm thinking about it in a different way now. At the time it was almost a throwaway remark in the notebook, but now it's beginning to mean something else. Anyway, I am excited about it so it's up for a revisit now, and drawings will begin in my 'portable studio' (last week's post) soon. It actually goes right back to the very beginning of this blog: June and July 2014 when my drawings were taking on the linear motifs which have since filled them. I was day-dreaming about making finned objects in semi-opaque glass last month. That technique is beyond my means at the moment, but I came up with a substitute! I laminated together 8 sheets of tissue paper using Golden medium. It made a lovely, stiff, slightly wrinkly material from which I was able to mock up a semi-opaque finned form.
A few years ago I dreamed up a work to be titled Objects of the Earth Celebrate the Birth of the Sky. It was to comprise 80 - 100 smallish ceramic objects arranged on a low table or plinth on the floor, or even just on the floor. These objects were to have earth-related shapes and the fact they were ceramic and made of earth was important.
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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. |