The Christmas exhibition is now available to view and purchase art online! So many wonderful Scottish artists have created postcard-size works especially for the event once again. And here are my little pieces joining the party! Browse and enjoy the exhibition.
A sort of bonkers astrology suggested itself to me in this fourth work I entered for the Christmas On a Small Scale exhibition. The basic materials are exactly the same as the three other drawings, the first layer being of a monoprint drawing in sepia and indigo inks using some of my Dad's old architectural forms then working back into it in mapping pens.
I do enjoy working at 210 x 150mm. I used to think it was A5, 210 x 148.5mm, which is a conventional sketch-book size, but soon discovered that the extra 1.5mm of the boards supplied by the Open Eye Gallery looked wrong with an A5 drawing mounted on them. The beauty of small scale work is that tiny elements make a huge difference, which is great for my kind of mark-making; the merest stroke of the pen, the texture of a line, each grainy smudge, and the paper itself assume a significance which is often lost in a larger work. This year I worked on paper sheets cut just slightly larger than the gallery boards, keeping them in a zipped folder acting as a drawing-board as well as safe transport for working on the move. Once the boards had arrived from the gallery I drew around them in pencil and carefully trimmed the drawings to the right size, which worked perfectly, in spite of my fears of cutting into the mount board and making wonky, torn edges. I thought it would be a good idea to work this way in future instead of using sketch-pads; I can dip in and out of drawings on interesting papers, and amass a collection of drawings all the same size. By next year, if I am invited to submit work to On a Small Scale again, I should have a good selection to choose from (just remember to buy some nice new sharp scalpel blades for trimming!) Ships That Sail is the third work submitted to On a Small Scale Christmas exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. Watercolours make their way into this drawing which is some way between map and diagram combining weather events, plus a large compass-like star, sails and navigation; again making use of my Dad's naval architectural templates (no idea how they should be properly used!)
On a Small Scale exhibition will be available to view and purchase exclusively online on the Open Eye Gallery's website from Saturday 25th November. All works in the exhibition are 15 x 21cm, either portrait or landscape format. This is the second drawing for the Christmas On a Small Scale exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. The materials and method are exactly the same as Dawn Chorus in the previous entry.
I used hand stitching in this work coming from the rainclouds to suggest magnetic movement, while turbulence is drawing up into the magnet shape from the earth below. Air vapours in the top right of the drawing puff out from a second brown magnet, like a reflection of the event; it's all about the mysteries of weather, condensation, and how I have always felt pulled towards the north. I imagine the invisible energies to be like this in Iceland (the continent, not the retail chain!) The works all arrived safely at the gallery, in spite of storm Babet forcing the Forth bridges to close at the time I sent them off by Royal Mail. On a Small Scale exhibition will be available to view and purchase exclusively online on the Open Eye Gallery's website during November and December. All works in the exhibition are 15 x 21cm, either portrait or landscape format. Having spread all my current small-scale works in progress, I next cut myself a rough window-mount in the dimensions for the Christmas show to place over early-stage drawings to see them clearly. The four monoprints below grabbed my attention the most, almost resolved already. This week I thought I had again broken my thumb which I fractured 6 years ago. I imagine it happened while moving the table out of my work room downstairs during the week. I went to work as usual and began stripping a hardwood chair, and the thumb became so painful I went to my workplace first aider, and they sent me off to hospital to have it examined. A very long story and finally an X-ray in A&E in the Kirkcaldy Victoria later, it turned out to be an "accelerated arthritic event". So, now the hand is in a splint to prevent movement in the thumb for a couple of weeks, which is a bit limiting - but still hoping to get the work done (luckily it's my left thumb and I'm right-handed).
The show must go on, as they say ... On Monday morning I was at work drawing and cutting scrolls for armchairs from card. It's quite nice cardboard and I was able to bring the spares left over home - they would have been binned otherwise. I reckon I can cut 4 little boards from them for work to submit to the On a Small Scale exhibition, saving the gallery having to post some to me. I need to run a test first; I want to laminate wood veneers onto them. I'm not sure how the mix of materials will work together but I don't see a problem if they are clamped under weights, and allowed to set slowly until nice and flat. They should meet the requirements of being no more than 2mm thick, measuring 21 x 15 cm in any orientation. Mine will be in portrait format as usual. Above are previous gouache paintings on wood veneers from 2015; I am thinking a cross between these and the drawings from one of my sketchbooks pictured below is where I want to be. I like to work with systems crossing other systems, and I think these would look handsome with space between the linear outlines filled with colour in bands so the wood grain can flow underneath.
My invitation from the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh to submit work for their annual On a Small Scale exhibition arrived this week. Schemes and plots for working on a larger scale than usual have been hatching in my brain, but now I am turning my attention to what would work well on the smaller postcard dimensions required for the show. I love taking part in the exhibition, this year I am going to have to be organised about it and make decisions early, list and order any materials I need, and plan the logistics ahead of time because I am so busy at work.
I put together a collage of some of the ideas floating around in my mind to help nail them down, so hopefully from this melange of sea-monsters, a beautiful cross-hatched Morandi drawing, glaciers, stars, navigation charts, comets and finned objects, something will emerge. 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.
Four works mounted on boards delivered to the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh for their Christmas Exhibition, On a Small Scale.
These will be available to buy exclusively from the gallery's online exhibition, which runs Saturday 26 November until Friday 23 December. They measure 21cm x 15cm (portrait). See previous blog entries for large images and details, or feel welcome to get in touch with me via my contact form if you would like any further information. I titled this drawing Breeze because of the large seed head wheeling in from the right hand side, breathing life and movement into the other forms - it feels fresh, like a May morning. I have been enjoying working in two colours, too. I delivered my works to the gallery yesterday, in the most dreadful weather. B drove us there in a pea-souper of a fog, particularly thick over the Forth, and heavy rainfall combined with the fog by the time we reached Edinburgh. Visibility was so poor we managed to get lost on the way and somehow ended up in Dean Village - a real treat, because neither of us have ever been there before, and it was beautiful in spite of the ghastly weather. It was also lovely to see the gallery again, I couldn't spend much time in there as B was driving around the block to pick me up outside, but I could see there was a colourful Glen Scouller exhibition (the last day of it) and I glimpsed a John Bellany painting on my way out - a shot in the arm of good art in the flesh.
Every spare minute sandwiched between my training course and home life just now is being spent on drawings for the Christmas exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, as the handing-in deadline approaches fast. Titles for the works are beginning to come to mind as the drawings progress. This one is definitely about volcanoes and primordial life forming in plumes of red and ash grey vapours. The paper is Awagami Kozo, the pens are fine mapping pens, and the shadowy shapes are monoprints taken by rolling a small inked roller over bits of plants in oil-based relief printing ink. The training course, by the way, is brilliant! This week I have been working in a sewing cabin learning how to thread and drive industrial sewing machines to overlock, trim, embroider and construct cushions and seat covers. Basic skills, but I'm hooked. I never realised how physical sewing is - always seemingly associated with a gentle female pastime, I have found in fact I need leg muscles of steel and a lot of stamina to control those machines and get through the daily work-load. Night cramps in muscle groups unaccustomed to such work were painful. Respect to all those machinists who churn out our Primark garments.
Next week I get training in woodwork skills ... exciting! Red ink work added, a few little creatures hidden in the growth, and this one is almost finished but for a few red accents I want to add. I will be submitting this alongside up to three more, depending on how much I can get done, to the Open Eye Gallery for its Christmas exhibition On a Small Scale.
I have a busy time ahead, entering the fourth week of an eight-week training course which I am benefitting from hugely. It has been a steep learning curve! - and my dear 'honorary brother' is coming over from Germany this week to stay for 9 or 10 days. Yesterday I was working on colour separations of two bright compositions with a view to making a pattern (here on my Binky blog). The proportions and 'attitude' of the designs were just right, and I grew interested in working them as drawings, picking up on something I was thinking about in May (you can see the original page from the manuscript here).
I was turning over ideas as to how to take them into the delicate realm of drawing today when I received an invitation to submit work for Open Eye Gallery's Christmas exhibition. I thought the Voynich inspired works could be perfect for that, but didn't yet know which direction to take or whether I had anything at all there beyond an idea. I didn't want to lose their quirky nature, so before accepting the gallery's invitation, I took an unprecedented step to see if my ideas would work - I traced outlines of the previous colourful experiments on my iPad. This enabled me to put several compositions together quickly and experiment with different drawing techniques. Working in Procreate, layers' visibility can be toggled on and off. I was interested in the marks where outlines were removed; they look so airy. The Open Eye Gallery's annual Christmas exhibition opens online today! It runs until 23 December, and my four music drawings are on show.
Four works trimmed and mounted on boards, details written up on the back, and all ready to go. Last week B drove me to Edinburgh to drop them off at the Open Eye Gallery in Abercromby Place. I would normally take the train to pick up the mount boards and then again a few days later to deliver the completed works, but I sprained my ankle rather badly three weeks ago and the walks to and from the train stations, although short, were out of the question. A shame, because I look forward to these annual trips. They have a sense of occasion and I never tire of the wonderful crossing of the River Forth; I'm also at leisure to stop for a chat with the wonderful Open Eye people, and to wander around and ogle all the beautiful art when I get there. Before the pandemic the Edinburgh Christmas German market was open at the time of delivery, too, which I absolutely loved.
Travel by car was an altogether different experience, however ... |
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
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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. |