Pictured below are some watercolours based on the manuscript I made in 2012. The photographs look fuzzy because the paintings are on semi-opaque Japanese tissue, so they cast a shadow on the mounting board below. They are animated and spirited, and impossible to photograph clearly. I was interested in weird roots back then.
Over time I have made a few works inspired by the Voynich manuscript, but I have never before got in really close and traced an image. Working on my iPad made it a delightful and natural process. It was fascinating to trace the movements of an unknown hand from the past, a kind of collaboration with an unkown person (or persons) spanning the centuries. I was surprised to see how my tracing above actually looked rational and somehow complete, making a kind of sense (at least to me) that the wildness of the original doesn't. That may or not be a good thing. I do ask myself the question, would it be so interesting if the manuscript wasn't such an unfathomable mystery? I love Culpeper's Herbal, too, but not to such a degree that I want to draw it. I can't remember when exactly I started using asemic text in my work, but I think that may also have originated in my interest in the Voynich manuscript.
Pictured below are some watercolours based on the manuscript I made in 2012. The photographs look fuzzy because the paintings are on semi-opaque Japanese tissue, so they cast a shadow on the mounting board below. They are animated and spirited, and impossible to photograph clearly. I was interested in weird roots back then. Further atrocities by Putin (I will not say Russia) against Ukraine provoked me into
making this peace poster. I know it is nothing really, but Ukrainian friends welcomed the support. This, however, made me proud today: "A group of 52 children from orphanages in Dnipro in Ukraine have arrived at their temporary new home in Scotland. The children and their guardians were supposed to leave Poland on Monday, but a vital document from the Ukrainian government was not ready in time. They will stay in the Callander area, near Stirling, before moving to Edinburgh in small family-style groups. Steven Carr from Dnipro Kids, which arranged the evacuation, said he was "ecstatic" to get them to safety. The Edinburgh charity, which was set up by Hibernian fans and has been supporting the orphanages for many years, enabled the children to flee Ukraine for Poland. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a welcome, and wrote: "I know you'd all rather be at home in Ukraine but you'll find love, care and support here for as long as you need it." BBC Scotland News Three delightfully creepy photos of roots in jars - my avocado pits of course, but these photos remind me of a really creepy museum my art school friends and I used to visit in the later half of the 70s to make drawings of weird curiosities in jars lined up in vitrines. I think of it often, but I'm not sure which museum it was; I remember it being quite close to the art school in Lauriston Place. There were some fairly gruesome things there, which seemed to glow with an unearthly light in the dim halls. I recently tried to discover more about the museum, and I think it may have been the Surgeons' Hall in Nicholson Square - although nowadays it looks so big and bright and posh I can't imagine a bunch of scruffy art students being let in to sketch the exhibits! I have been planning to make some work based on the beautiful ice patterns which formed on our garden table back in early December, but I've been finding it difficult to find a way of approaching it. The photos I took at the time were too mystifying and I couldn't make out what was going on, so I took the decision to begin with tracing a photo I took that morning on my iPad to get to the bottom of it - an unusual decision for me.
Playing around with the Polynesian stick drawings I made last week was as far as things went this week, being busy reorganising my Binky Redbubble shop. In fact I was so busy I didn't even get around to posting this entry until next week. That makes no sense whatsoever unless time-travel is your thing but thanks to the post-dating tool I can keep everything in order for quick reference. The digital wobble is still there in the lines and it's interesting to see linen textures I created for some of my pattern designs put to a different use. If I were to develop this work, the question is, would I keep the digiwobbles? Hurrah, I just invented a new word!
A collage of elements is always somewhere to start blue-sky thinking. Things somehow insinuate themselves next to something else in a way I would never have consciously imagined, and a bit of serendipity never goes amiss in artworking. I spend hours in this happy playground, and the exercise steers me away from preconceived notions and drawing by rote. The image above is composed from some of the bits and pieces which I showed jumbled together in last week’s entry. I inverted the image to get some reversed colours to use, the image below displays its full pastelly glory. (It’s all getting rather painterly, I may even have to get back to using oils again at some point).
I call this collage, but is it really? From French coller to stick, in its turn from colle glue. It was composed in Procreate (the drawing app with so much more!) after ‘cutting up’ scans of previous drawings and inventing blooms, so the only sticky stuff involved is digital glue. Pasty pixels rock. |
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. |