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.
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.
As I worked directly on top of the plant-like elements I had inserted in last week's drawing, I was already replacing them with another idea for wild, manic plants twisting and pushing from fluted pots for the next one. I realised last week's didn't work because there were two different ideas going on in a small drawing: the plant elements were flat and cartoon-like, whereas the fluted forms bear the illusion of three dimensionality - basically, there were two styles of drawing not sitting well together.
This time, with a clear idea of what I want to achieve, I began with a simple line sketch of nasturtiums. It's an idea which began to take root (pun not intended) late last summer, when I photographed fascinating plant activity in some of the weirder areas of the garden - so much stranger and more intriguing than anything I could make up! Truth is stranger than fiction, so this sketch of nasturtiums is based on one of those photos. Above, work in progress. My notes and criticisms can be seen in the margins while I decided this drawing had to be either about the fluted forms, or the wanderings of last week - not both. So I worked directly over the drawing, eradicating which for now is the unwanted wanderings. They will soon come back in another form, where fluted pots and wild plants are in harmony. The ink in an Edding mapping pen (01) was sufficiently dense to cover the drawing made with a Uni Pin 0.05 pen (which, incidentally, got completely used up making this work). The paper is imitation Japanese tissue, inexpensive and good for experiments and tracing, and wrinkles very slightly and delightfully where the marks are dense. So the wanderings of last week have now gone ... I had also been trying to make a 15 x 21cm size drawing from the original notebook sketch; it didn't work (which is why I had wandered and tried adding bits to the drawing to fill the space - it just goes to show you can't fiddle with an original idea). Here it is now looking much happier, the photo cropped down to a proportion closer to the original tiny sketch, only adding a little more dark space above the pots. This part of the sheet now measures 16.5 x 15.5cm.
I also liked the tonality of the notebook sketch, so for the first time I tried out some traditional mark-making using lots of cross-hatching together with the cartoon-style lines I normally use. It's interesting! - quite a range of tone resulted, I like the ghostly effect of the lighter forms against the dark. As I worked I was also thinking of some of my larger drawings with used a dark background, like Before There Were Saturdays. It's important to me right now to create the background with pen rather than painting in a black background, which would have been a lot faster, but wouldn't have had the same movement. 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.
Well, not really an entire studio but this little set-up is ideal for small drawings. A nice sturdy zip-up folder with places for pens, rulers, protractors, curves templates or whatever I want to use. It even has a built-in calculator which I probably won't use for drawings, but you never know when it may come in handy. It has a good capacity for a number of different papers cut to a size slightly larger than 15 x 21cm, Open Eye Gallery's On a Small Scale dimensions.
This is how I worked on the drawings for the 2023 Christmas exhibition; I started them in my studio space, put them in this folder and took them to day-job in the car, where I was able to put in a few minutes here and there during breaks. So, this is good - I have begun the new year by setting up a way to work on the move. 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 ... I had to accept the fact that the work I had planned on wood veneers wasn't going to work for the Open Eye Gallery Christmas show. The thin wood veneers need to be fixed to a solid substrate such as plywood or mdf, probably about 1cm deep. The requirement for the exhibition is a maximum of 2mm on mount-board, which wouldn't work with the undulating veneers being stronger than the card - it would just warp the card and not lie completely flat, even after pressing.
So, I had to have a rethink about what I was going to make for the show. In the mean time, I had moved the large table out of my work room. This meant I could now spread pieces of work I already had in progress all over the floor and assess what I had all in one space; before, I just had untidy heaps of drawings and sketches lying on the tabletop and couldn't see what was what. So here I am, having a good thinking session! Outside in the garden, beside the barbecue and next to the bench where we sit whilst making delicious food, this plank of wood rests on an old chair frame. The strange markings on it have been rousing my curiosity for a while. This morning the light was so even it was a good opportunity to photograph them I'm not sure how the markings got there; the first photo I know shows stains where small pots of vegetable seedlings had rested for a while. The circles I think I must have drawn absent-mindedly at some point. I don't remember doing it, but I always carry pencils in the pocket of my work trousers for marking up templates. I noticed the other day when we were out there that they are exactly the same dimensions as the foot of a wine glass. This tree must have appeared from my pencil without even thinking as I chatted to B as he barbecued away. This wonderful piece of calligraphy is cut into the plank, it must have been used as a rest for sawing at some point. It's actually a lovely piece of timber with some stories to tell, and actually relates in a strange way to the little paintings I wrote about a couple of weeks ago - probably the reason I suddenly started paying attention to it. It's strange how the mind often completely does its own thing in the background, then pops it all to the front and ideas begin to blossom.
I began making a 'Giant 9' for Instagram and realised the upper leaves and centre of the flower had yet to be filled with shading, so here it is now in its full finished glory (see the unfinished version here).
I enjoy my blog here, it's a record of my work I would be unlikely to keep so well. But I'm not very regular with my IG posts. Like many other artists I find social media disturbing and would rather not use it, but I have to ask myself, what is the point in making all this work if I don't show it anywhere? So, soldier on with Instagram I shall. A second idea I had in mind for the earth section of this drawing was to fill the strata lines with energised red darts flowing upwards into the flower section. When I was a youngster (and sometimes still to this day) I used to fancy I could see red energy shooting through the trunks and branches of trees. I had temporarily removed the large petal to the right of the flower head, but liked the ghostly transparent shading which remained. It had occurred to me that plants are more than part earth, part flower - they are also of the air, especially when their seeds float off, dressed in fairy costumes. I liked the way the ghost petal puffs airily across the linear work so I included it. I also remembered a collage I made in January 2021 with a big trumpet shooting out of a flower, and had liked its ridiculous humour, so I added something similar to this version. When I had finished the bulb section beneath the flower head I didn't like the way it looked with the crossed over leaf stems, a hangover from the original Voynich manuscript which worked fine in the first version of the drawing (finished version below). The red darts made the cross section resembled laces on a dance shoe, or the waistcoat of a lady Highland dancer - not what I had in mind at all. An amended version of the drawing made the section into a more organic affair, with leaf shoots peeling out of the bulb itself instead of crossing over it. I recognise the fact that this isn't exactly dynamic blogging, the image hardly changing from post to post, but, hey - art is like that sometimes.
Progressing with one of the ideas I have for the earth section of this drawing, turning it green. Originally inspired by the Voynich manuscript, while I was working on this I came across some photos of bromeliads and canistrum orchids which bear a resemblance to Voynich illustrations. The top photo is a bromeliad, beneath that a canistrum orchid. Next to them are the Voynich images they remind me of, and at the bottom a Binky Voynich-type drawing. Like many people, I have often speculated upon the mysterious document's meaning, but while I was working on a little set of Binky sketches based around Voynich images last year I had two thoughts: one was that it seems to me there may have been more than one artist working on the book due to slight differences in the style of drawing, but that aside I felt there was a type of innocence about the illustrations which suggested they had been made from description without ever having seen the plants. If the Voynich manuscript was some kind of a medical/alchemical Herbal written during the time of the Italian Renaissance, coinciding with the Medical Renaissance, there would definitely have been a lot of interest in plants such as bromeliads and orchids because of their their medicinal properties. Perhaps there was a great uncle explorer writing home from abroad about all these wondrous botanical discoveries? Speculate on ...
This is how the Voynich-type plant drawing, begun in April, is growing. It has come quite a way since Virginia Woolf provided my first inspiration for describing the notion of part earth, part flower, and my first few lines exploring a Voynich Manuscript plant as a springboard for the work. The cyan-coloured line around the flower-head, seen in the image above, is actually just a guide I drew for a fringed surround. The detail on the left below shows it without the guide line; the right-hand image is without any lines at all - I am always intrigued by the airy, ethereal little marks which come together to make a whole. One day I want to make a whole drawing just like that, but for now the method may help make some good 'aromas' for my Neruda's boats work. This demonstrates how useful I find it to use my iPad as a tool not just for creating work which would make good prints, but also as a space for experimenting and testing new ideas for work on paper. Each element is on its own layer, so the visibility can be toggled on and off: a good thing for this drawing, because I have a few different ideas for dealing with the earth element in the lower section. I may eventually leave the plain linear form as it is, but I will definitely be trying out a few other things in layers to see what appears.
Those wheels I drew last week didn't work at all as I had imagined. I tried a few different drawings with them but nothing worked. I should perhaps have kept one of the fails to show here, but they were just confusing me and actually making me feel a bit sick! So those wheels, for the time being at least, shall remain in the lands of Binky patterns. I think there were two main problems: one, they didn't look as much like lights as I had hoped, and two, the style of drawing didn't gel with my current work. So, above, you can see new drawings based on the wheels, but now constructed in a linear fashion. They look a bit like Renaissance stars and are sitting much better with my work now. Here is a progress update on the Voynich inspired plant life drawing, "part earth, part flower" I have on the go just now. It has changed quite a bit, and you can see where one section of shading has been started.
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.
|
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. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
All
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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. |